Strange problem with Steam games

[Malaki-LEGEND.sys]

Hey gang! So I'm having a strange issue that seems to just effect games that I launch with my Steam Client.

I'll be playing through either a demo of a game like Tomb Raider or Sleeping Dogs or even a retail game like Deus Ex, and after an undetermined amount of time(could be 10 minutes, could be an hour), the game locks up and all sorts of graphical tearing starts occurring. I'll force out of the game, only to see that the Steam window itself starts to become glitchy, and so does Google Chrome, which will crash and then never open again unless I restart the system.

Needless to say, this is quite vexing as a guy who is trying to get back into PC gaming. I've recently updated my GeForce drivers to the latest(302.72 or something I believe), but have yet to try anything out just yet. I had read previously that nVidia was having certain issues with previous driver versions, so that may have been the problem. Nevertheless, here are my system specs:

AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition unlocked to an X4 B55 at 3.5 ghz

4GB DDR3 RAM

eVGA GeForce GTX460 1GB DDR5

Windows 7 Home 64-bit

I haven't tried testing the RAM yet as some leads have led me to, although I have found posts saying that it could be a DX11 issue, which strikes me as possible since I have never encountered this problem with Street Fighter X Tekken. Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance, guys!

[Rockos]

Hey gang! So I'm having a strange issue that seems to just effect games that I launch with my Steam Client.

I'll be playing through either a demo of a game like Tomb Raider or Sleeping Dogs or even a retail game like Deus Ex, and after an undetermined amount of time(could be 10 minutes, could be an hour), the game locks up and all sorts of graphical tearing starts occurring. I'll force out of the game, only to see that the Steam window itself starts to become glitchy, and so does Google Chrome, which will crash and then never open again unless I restart the system.

Needless to say, this is quite vexing as a guy who is trying to get back into PC gaming. I've recently updated my GeForce drivers to the latest(302.72 or something I believe), but have yet to try anything out just yet. I had read previously that nVidia was having certain issues with previous driver versions, so that may have been the problem. Nevertheless, here are my system specs:

AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition unlocked to an X4 B55 at 3.5 ghz

4GB DDR3 RAM

eVGA GeForce GTX460 1GB DDR5

Windows 7 Home 64-bit

I haven't tried testing the RAM yet as some leads have led me to, although I have found posts saying that it could be a DX11 issue, which strikes me as possible since I have never encountered this problem with Street Fighter X Tekken. Any thoughts or help would be greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance, guys!

If you say graphical glitche and google chrome crash, you have an hardware starting to fail. Check out your GFX card temperature. If it's high and you have some artifact on the screen, it is an video faillure. Memory could be at fault. Driver also. Windows dll corruption or even a virus.

But you need further testing. Try a game that is not steam. Try an older dx9 game. Always check your gfx & cpu temp. It should isolate the problem to software or hardware. Keep us to the last news about it. I can be of great help.

[Moseph]

Also, if your GFX and/or CPU temperature is high, the culprit could be dust. I had a bout of crashes in graphic intensive games a while back that turned out to be caused by dust in the graphics card. If you haven't cleaned out the inside of your computer recently, it certainly wouldn't hurt to do so.

EDIT: Have you tried directly running the executables for the games and bypassing Steam altogether? The executable files for the games are in the Steam/steamapps folder.

[Malaki-LEGEND.sys]

Well thus far I've reinstalled Steam, updated my GTX 460 to the latest drivers, and tried out Sleeping Dogs again with Speedfan running. CPU was stable at around 43-44c, while the GPU seemed to be pretty high at around 65c, of course I had read before that GPUs were designed to run at much higher temps, so I figured that was fine. I had also read before that certain versions of nVidias graphics drivers pretty close to the one I had previously installed caused issues with the fan or something, so that might have had an adverse effect.

I was able to play through the Sleeping Dogs demo in its entirety without any problems at all other than some goofy framerate issue that had been reported by plenty of users before. I'm going to give Mass Effect 2 a shot since I don't have it through Steam to see how that goes for about an hour or so and report back. Thanks for the feedback so far, gang.

Oh and I haven't tried running the games through their .exes, although I'll give it a try if the issue persists. My case is also due for a cleaning as well. I'm actually also having a fan issue that I've had since I built the machine in that the side panel fan is obnoxiously loud. It could just be the way I have it screwed in, but I wonder if it might be a voltage issue or something? Thanks again, gang!

[Rockos]

Well thus far I've reinstalled Steam, updated my GTX 460 to the latest drivers, and tried out Sleeping Dogs again with Speedfan running. CPU was stable at around 43-44c, while the GPU seemed to be pretty high at around 65c, of course I had read before that GPUs were designed to run at much higher temps, so I figured that was fine. I had also read before that certain versions of nVidias graphics drivers pretty close to the one I had previously installed caused issues with the fan or something, so that might have had an adverse effect.

I was able to play through the Sleeping Dogs demo in its entirety without any problems at all other than some goofy framerate issue that had been reported by plenty of users before. I'm going to give Mass Effect 2 a shot since I don't have it through Steam to see how that goes for about an hour or so and report back. Thanks for the feedback so far, gang.

Oh and I haven't tried running the games through their .exes, although I'll give it a try if the issue persists. My case is also due for a cleaning as well. I'm actually also having a fan issue that I've had since I built the machine in that the side panel fan is obnoxiously loud. It could just be the way I have it screwed in, but I wonder if it might be a voltage issue or something? Thanks again, gang!

No problem. Keep us up to date. I'll like to know if the drivers where at fault

[JadeAuto]

I had a similar issue lately. My computer would blue screen randomly, usually anytime I did anything graphics intensive.

Had to replace the mobo, memory, and hard drive before I fixed it.

[Malaki-LEGEND.sys]

Hey gang sorry for the lax in responding, but I think after a few days of testing some things out, updating some stuff, and above all cleaning out my case as best I can and rearranging some components, with a side order of some "no duh" moments, I think I've been able to fix the problem.

After initially updating my video drivers, I thought the problem had been taken care of. This was proven false as not only did the vid crashing happen once more during an extended Deus Ex 3 play, but I also got a blue screen during DE3 AND a play through a Left 4 Dead 2 online campaign.

Running a debug session after the DE3 error, I deduced it was a USB conflict(am using a Netgear wireless N USB receiver), which led me to believe my mainboard(an ASUS M4A88T-M for reference) was acting up. This wouldn't be surprising given my haphazard construction of the PC in the first place. When the L4D2 error occured however, the debug dump reported that it was a problem with the .exe. Pairing this with the previous reminded me of a review I read about my mainboard when paired with certain coolers; Specifically a certain Coolermaster brand CPU fan that uncomfortably sits above a RAM slot on the board.

I then decided to just open up the system, give it a good cleaning and rearrange anything I can. Sure enough, the system innards were pretty dusty so I cleaned up everything from the fans to the GPU, and I moved the RAM around to a less precarious spot(or rather slot).

I then decided to run Speedfan to see how my temps were doing, since overheating was no doubt a potential problem. Things were within manufacture safety ranges, but I wasn't satisfied. It was here that I had my "no duh, stupid!" moment: I opened up eVGA Precision because I had remembered I could control the fan speed that way. I then noticed that the fan was set to auto, but found it strange that it wasn't doing a great job, so I set it to manual and tested out some higher RPMs. Sure enough, I heard the GPU fan more than I ever had, which led me to believe that auto NEVER worked properly. I set it to a lower RPM that wasn't ear-jarring, but that was still much higher than the default set up and bingo! A run through of a few games showed me that temps had decreased by an average of 7 or so Celsius.

It's been 2 days since and I haven't had a single problem on hours-long playthroughs of DE3, L4D2, and Tomb Raider Underworld, so for now I feel like it's case closed. The moral of the story: Stay updated, keep things clean, and keep an eye on fan speeds.

I'll let you guys know if anything comes up at all. Thanks again for the responses.

[Rockos]

Especially Evga seems to have more voltage on their board so they run higher but are more risky to blue screen.

But in the same way I already had the same problem. And I didn't solve it in 6 month. But I changed my pc and kept some piece from my old since I was suspucious about my board. I'm not investigating the board anymore but it is obviously the cause of the problem. It was one time out of three boot I could blue screen in the first 10 min of run. And memtest could give live 20,000 of error or could have just froze. And then you restarted it and it could never give you an error even after 24h of memtest.

Computers are so uncomprehensible. Still I love them! I'm happy you could resolve it at least. Keep us updated. I'm interested in this.