Crash analysis after overheating

Colonel_Panic

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 5, 2009
Messages
328
My workstation (specs in signature) is cooled with 2x Zalman Reserator 1 towers, and this week here in Ottawa we've been seeing temperatures in the mid 30 C (85-90 F) which means the ambient temperature is about 31 C.

Normally when I do gaming or anything intensive the water temperature hits a max of about 35C. Today I hit 41C and the computer BSODed twice during different games of Starcraft 2. According to WhoCrashed, the problem was caused by ntoskrnl.exe and had the error DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. Could this be overheating? I watched the CPU temps as I played and they didn't reach over 70C.

After your computer crashes, what crash log data can point to overheating? I'm thinking I need to help the computer out with some active cooling fans.
 
That is usually literally a driver crash. 41c coolant temperature is NOT HOT/ with active cooling my coolant temps can go to 40-45 max and that is with 3 GPUs in loop. I have no stability issues at all. Just update your motherboard, vga, and sound drivers to the latest versions. Maybe that will help?
 
Thanks for the reply. My GTX470 was overclocked with EVGA Precision to 675 MHz, so I dialed it back to 650. Drivers are updated, as far as I can tell, but I'll do another check. The earlier crash had an error of "ATTEMPTED_EXECUTE_OF_NOEXECUTE_MEMORY" so I'll keep looking around.

What kind of temperatures might cause the CPU to call it quits and reboot?
 
I did a BIOS update and reset some of the mobo settings and I think the problem may have been insufficient voltage to the CPU. I set the BCLK to what it was before, then left voltage to AUTO it the board set the voltage higher than what I had it originally, so I'll do a little testing on this and see how it stands up.
 
CPU's generally do not reboot due to high temperatures. Reboots are caused by unstable overclocks. Higher temperatures usually also mean that you need more voltage to stabilize the same overclock. What may be stable in the winter is probably not stable in the summer, provided you don't have air conditioning maintaining the same temperatures.

Once CPU's hit a certain temperature limit, they automatically downclock to lower temperatures.
 
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