Folding Forum

My system crashes blue screens about once a day. I used a crash dump analyzer, and it says it is caused by dxgkrnl.sys (directx graphics kernel), and the process that was using it was FahCore_18.exe.

I'm using the most up to date BIOS, Nvidia graphic driver, Chipset, Folding@Home 7.4.4.
I have two graphics cards in the machine (GeForce GTX 670 and 660 Ti) that were folding. Yesterday I paused one of them thinking that was the cause of the problem, and yet it still crashed. Neither is overclocked. GPU temp is 73C, CPU is 20%, system RAM is 36%. It seems to fold fine as far as completing work units.
Any ideas?

The crash dump analyzers never do much good for me. I have seen dxgkrnl.sys often enough too, but that just means it was around at the time of the crash, not the cause of it. In general, a crash is usually hardware rather than software. In my case, the recent crashes have been due to bad disk drives (both hard drives and SSDs), and also the SATA cables, even though they were just storage drives, not the OS drive. I would try disconnecting them, or replacing the cables, before going much further. Also, any PCIe expansion cards could be the cause; try removing them until you find it. Have you changed memory recently? Some modules (or combinations) are more stable than others; usually two modules are more stable than four, and above all else, don't overclock.

But I have also had to disable a disk caching program (Samsung Rapid Mode cache), and even choose the right AHCI drivers to get the machine stable. I have really never seen a case of a Folding core causing problems to that extent, though it may be possible on the betas.

Since folding does not use DirectX, I would guess there was an application running that was competing for video resources at the time of the crash.

I forget to mention anti-virus programs. Their "real time protection" sometimes latches onto files, causing crashes of various sorts. The exclusions don't always work, but at least try excluding the FAH program and data folders. You could try disabling the AV for a while if necessary. Windows Defender (spyware only on Win7) is good enough for me, and does not cause problems.