OBWANDO n00bie
So, I bought a BFG 8800 GT OC 512 meg from CompUsa last night (got a great deal from a friend).
My machine runs XP64 SP2 all updates with 8 gigs of memory, Radeon x1900xtx, Dual 290 Opterons on a K8WE board (dual nforce), 800W power supply. It is also my main Dev PC so it absolutely must be stable and has been for 9 months now.
I put the card in, installed the drivers (169.02). BSOD. Since I develop drivers also, I figured I would take a look at the crashdump. The bugcheck is: SYSTEM_PTE_MISUSE (da) but you will you will probably see it as Driver mismanaging system PTE. (Page Table Entry)
If you use the VGA driver, it is stable all day, all nite. However with 169.02 or .04 drivers, different story. Now, the BSOD only happens when an accelerated action is requested or any 3d operation. Pull up a browser with flash, you may crash out. Open up the display panel, you will crash out. It is easy to reproduce. It took about 30 minutes last night to get through, and troubleshoot with the support tech. Good guy, good manners, kudos to BFG on the support.
Unfortunately, he gave a bad diagnosis that the video memory on the card was bad. I like to make sure of things so I put it in my other test PC. It has a clean copy of XP32, 64, vista32 and 64. I fired up the XP64 copy which was running SP1. Installed the card, installed the driver, rebooted. No issues. Ran crysis demo as a test, no issues. Rock solid. I installed SP2 on the test PC and retested, no issues.
Now I have only started researching this, but in the crash dump. The dump is suggesting that our offender here is: nv4_mini!grContextInstanceToObject+0xf which is flagging nv4_mini.sys and nv4_disp.dll. No I did not export the nv4_mini.sys, but windbg says its a routine in there.
So, if you are running XP64, there is something that is causing an issue. If you do a google search on "mismanaging pte xp 64 nvidia" you will find this is an old issue that has been around, but never addressed (or at least from what I could find). I think the sudden rage is because the 8800 GT is a compelling reason to get a new card. More people, more squeaky wheels, more flame.
If I can get more time, I will begin to dissect whats going on. Both test PC and my main PC have the same NTOSKRNL (5.2.3790.4045) and VIDEOPORT.SYS (5.2.3790.3959) which is the last update I had seen (hotfix from in october).
Call chain is as follows from newest to oldest (you read from bottom up) and all 5 dumps I have are completely identical:
nt!KeBugCheckEx (Say hello to Mr. Blue screen)
nt!MmUnmapIoSpace+0x37b (NTOSKRNL.EXE)
VIDEOPRT!pVideoPortFreeDeviceBase+0x93 (VIDEOPRT.SYS) - (NV4_Mini.sys)
VIDEOPRT!VideoPortUnmapMemory+0xe (VIDEOPRT.SYS) - (NV4_Mini.sys)
nv4_mini!grContextInstanceToObject+0xf
I'll start tearing it apart later, but I do have to say that I'm a little irritated that putting a video card in my system that was completely stable shouldn't force me to reload my OS or start doing low level debugging.
I called BFG back, waited for another tech and reported my findings. But from what I see preliminarily, this isnt a hardware issue, its more of a driver / OS update issue that has been around awhile.
One other thing. I also cleaned all traces of ATI and Nvidia out of the system and retested twice, same crashing result.
--Royal
Last edited by OBWANDO : Yesterday at 10:01 PM.