What's up forum dwellers - New Vegas runs very well on my system - frame rate wise that is.

I run on a mix of High and Ultra off of a 9800GTX+ 512 and a venerable Opteron 165 overlcocked @ 2.4ghz. 2Gigs of Ram, a Corsair HX520 PSU and Win XP pro round out the specs. I'm using Nvidia driverset 260.89 and also have the dx9.dll 'fix' in my New Vegas directory.

So things are going great, until I hit V.A.T.S., queue an attack and hit 'E.' at that point, when the firing cinematic begins I'd say I hit a BSOD about 25% of the time. The game freezes, the audio produces one long whine and it BSOD's with the "Machine_Check_Exception" message. I've also had the same BSOD once while trying to switch from the Varmint Rifle to the 9mm via pip-boy.

I'm curious if BSOD's are plaguing anyone else in the community. It could be the game hates my overclock or my antique processor. I'd like to try un-overclocking the CPU back to its stock measly 1.8ghz...but It works so well on everything else that I'm reluctant to chop it down just for a single game, especially if its an issue that might be addressed in a future patch. The overclock is stable as far as those things go...its been prime95'd on each core simultaneously without going over 51C or producing errors....all the other games on-board love it, including the GameBryo ball-busting Nehrim TC for Oblivion which runs great on very high settings...

I had the same New Vegas BSOD on an earlier driver set, which is why I updated - following DriverCleaner.net's proper cleaning procedures I might add. Then I had two before inserting the .dll fix which helped resolve some scenery chop I was getting. So far BSOD's have been consistent across all these additions. Steam is the only major application running behind New Vegas, with the obvious exception of XP. Otherwise there are about 24 processes running in total when New Vegas is up, I could probably thin those out a bit just for the hell of it....

But.

Sound familiar to anybody?

Yes there are several threads about this, and seeing as new vegas aint the most demanding game out there and so many people have this problem with this game and no other game, i dont think it has anything to do with our computers being too old, hope a patch will fix this soon..

Turning off the sound acceleration in dxdiag or even lowering it to basic fixes this problem

Similar system, same video card as op.

For now updating audio drivers and turning off sound acc has worked for me.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/bluescreenview.zip download this and tell me which file caused BSOD. BSOD is driver related or hardware problem.

SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED 0x1000007e

Thats the one we all have been getting, all 40 or 50 of us. It is a driver issue (it referenced a nvidia driver).

possibly faulty card due to overheating, solder joints messed up and can cause bsod i have had this happen long ago. The cause was dyw ro dust build up, weak PSU, no airflow. Card kept dying. New PC has 5 fans, dust fitlers and Card has external exhaust not a single bsod ever on this computer. Id test a non nvidia card if you have friends. (Dust,Airflow, Power) usually kill the card.

If the issue goes away with a new card then you found your culript. Its not the nvidia driver, its a hardware problem.

So all the people on this forum, that are having this issue, with a similar setup, all are having an overheating video card? Your mental powers are impressive my friend.

You are wrong btw, I have both a hardware temp gauge and a software one. I have a lquid cooling system, my video card never goes above 60 F.

See http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1122696-blue-screen-of-deathoverand-over-dxgiag-included/ or http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1126403-computer-restarts-during-combat-vats/

That is just 3 topics off the top of my head. And If you only count the 10 or so people that posted in them having the issue(seen many others here and in other forums complaining of the same BSOD), well then you have to agree the likelihood of every single one of them having overheating cards is about nil.


And Like I said before, the sound issues fixed the crash. This is the game conflicting with drivers, not a hardware issue. I just want to make sure a perm fix is put it for what is clearly a game issue.