1080Ti, 471.41 drivers causing DWM.EXE crashes (SOLVED!) Six Months later on 512.15 - problems back! :(

TheSlySyl

TheSlySyl

2[H]4U
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Anyone else seeing this?

I'm running a GTX 1080Ti. Yes, my ambient is higher than normal at times due to summer heat but that doesn't seem to matter. I've had it crashed at load, at idle, and even with the screen turned off. Sometimes I can play for hours at load, other times I was just browsing chrome and it happened. Reverting to 466.77 seems to have fixed it.

It's a weird crash, all 3 of my monitors just suddenly go black. Audio still plays, based on audio I seem to still have keyboard/mouse movement, luckily i've been able to shutdown the computer with keyboard commands even without seeing a screen.

Event viewer says DWM.EXE crashed based on KERNALBASE.DLL, picture never comes back but the crash happens like 5 times in a row (with the audio cue for "new hardware connected" each time, probably the monitors.) then it gives up and stops.

Wondering if its a weird quirk of my system or something slightly more widespread.
 
Alright, so, using old drivers has NOT fixed the problem. It crashed again with the screens off and then another time with them on. The second time I was literally just on my desktop transferring files around.

1627716723224.png


This is what it looks like, it tries to recover and then crashes again (which is what all the errors are) then it pretty quickly just stops trying to recover and the screens stay off, despite everything else being responsive.

Last hardware change was over a month ago when I got a new SSD for my OS - which cloned over and was fantastic. Other than that, I think there's been some boring windows updates and the new drivers. I've completely turned off my overclock and underclocks on all my system hardware so I don't think its a hardware fault.
 
Turns out all that does is make a nice beep noise and nothing else seems to happen.

I've disconnected my 2nd and 3rd monitors and turned off my hardware monitoring programs and even my Minecraft server, I'll see if it continues to crash. It's happening more frequently now, annoyingly.
 
Use DDU to uninstall the NV drivers. Reinstall with latest driver. See if that helps.
 
TheSlySyl said:
Turns out all that does is make a nice beep noise and nothing else seems to happen.

I've disconnected my 2nd and 3rd monitors and turned off my hardware monitoring programs and even my Minecraft server, I'll see if it continues to crash. It's happening more frequently now, annoyingly.
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the beep is supposed to confirm it reset. so it clearly isnt working.
try swapping between them, try DDU like DooKey said.
 
DooKey said:
Use DDU to uninstall the NV drivers. Reinstall with latest driver. See if that helps.
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I used DDU when I reverted to the old "good" driver (4.66) and in good news, with running a very minor list of programs, it didn't crash during the 8+ hours I was at work. Also, my PLEX server was operating normally, which is good. (I use it to listen to music at work.)

I'm beginning to think the culprit, if its not the display driver, is either Rainmeter (I DID update to a newer beta recently, I have reverted it to the lowest version that my particular skins allow, but i'm just leaving it off for now.) Or somehow my minecraft server is causing it, I'm gonna leave both off for now and see if it happens again.

Which is a bit annoying, as i've been working on a big project in minecraft.
 
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I think I may have figured it out. We added a box fan to a nearby window. (As I said, it's been hot as hell) Completely different outlet and was connected to a really old surge protector.

When it's on, it's power draw combined with the window AC unit in the next room over is enough that it was lowering the AC input enough that my video card (highest power draw item in my computer) was freaking out due to it already being undervolted. However the drop itself wasn't enough to bother any other component in the system because none of them were already running undervolted.

That's the current theory at least. Also explains why things were more stable with less monitors because I was pulling less power.

We'll see if it happens again, and I'm throwing out that surge protector.

I do have a new PSU for this system that I've been too lazy to install, so I think that may be the next step if things continue.

The seeming randomness of the DWM.EXE crashes were correlated to the AC unit turning on and not the computer itself.
At least I hope so.
 
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Since turning off that fan and changing out the surge protector on the other side of the room, haven't had a single crash. It's only been 24 hours but considering the frequency of crashes before I think that was the culprit.

Computers are weird.

I'm also thinking the dwm.exe crashes when the computer was idle are due to the massive spike in graphics card usage while transcoding due to plex. However, as no one using plex is involved with the visual output of a local display output, it wouldn't have stopped playback.
 
I remember a youtuber talking about not being able to replicate an overclock they've been able to do a few times, and eventually they figured out it was an extension cord they have been using.

Shrinking tolerances, higher precision electronics and pushing the limit of the silicon all contributes I guess.
 
A UPS can help with voltage input irregularities. It helped in my case when I wasn't able to track down a similar issue. I got one that does simulated sine wave.
 
Armenius said:
A UPS can help with voltage input irregularities. It helped in my case when I wasn't able to track down a similar issue. I got one that does simulated sine wave.
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I have a UPS and that's actually how I was able to figure it out.

I finally found a way to trigger DWM.exe crashing (Cyberpunk 2077, funny enough)

Normally without the box fan running my UPS was running at 115-121 volts.

With the fan running it was down to 105-110 volts. Not low enough to trigger the UPS protection, but enough to trigger this very particular crash with my undervolted video card when it encountered a load. I'm guessing why DWM.exe was crashing with the monitors off was caused by Plex starting to transcode a h.265 video (which is what most of my media is these days.)

Hasn't crashed since I unplugged the fan and switched out that surge protector, but I have mostly been at work.
 
Just wanted to update, well over a month now and I haven't had a single DWM.EXE crash or any driver related crashes, i've since replaced my undervolt, upgraded to the latest drivers and have been using the computer completely as normal. I'm getting uptimes of multiple weeks and only having to do a reboot when windows requires it.

Make sure you use quality surge protectors is the takeaway here, I suppose.
 
Card has been absolutely solid since the last post until yesterday.

I finally installed a windows update after nearly 30 days of uninterrupted uptime and now my dwm.exe keeps crashing just like it did previously. I installed new graphics drivers, new amd chipset drivers and removed all overclocks/underclocks from my hardware and...well, we'll see where it goes from here.

Unless the UPS decided to suddenly give out dirty power, I know it's not the house power this time around. So something had to have happened in that windows update but I don't know what the hell it could be.

Took out the videocard, reseated it and all cables, and everything seems to be working smooth. IDFK.
 
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idk if it's the 512.15 drivers or what, but my PC has been crashing while gaming quite a bit. however i also installed a 3080 ti recently so i can't be sure if it's the new card, although temps and everything are fine and there are none of the typical symptoms of a bad or failing gpu. it *seems* to be more likely to crash the more demanding (i.e. closer to 100% gpu load) the game is, but it's not always the case, and some games that are 100% load most of the time have not crashed once..

even did a fresh install of win 11 (latest build, all updates, etc) but it's the same. no overclock on anything either (despite what my sig still says, lol)

event viewer error logs the crashs as the game's exe about 50% and the other 50% it shows either an nvidia driver dll or directX (DXGI.dll).
 
TheSlySyl said:
Card has been absolutely solid since the last post until yesterday.

I finally installed a windows update after nearly 30 days of uninterrupted uptime and now my dwm.exe keeps crashing just like it did previously. I installed new graphics drivers, new amd chipset drivers and removed all overclocks/underclocks from my hardware and...well, we'll see where it goes from here.

Unless the UPS decided to suddenly give out dirty power, I know it's not the house power this time around. So something had to have happened in that windows update but I don't know what the hell it could be.

Took out the videocard, reseated it and all cables, and everything seems to be working smooth. IDFK.
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Roll back that update and see if it returns to normal.
 
I think somehow over the years a connector got loose - either to the motherboard or one of the power cables (whether on the PSU side or gpu side I'm not sure.)

1080ti, or at least my particular 1080ti, seem extremely sensitive to voltage changes.

That said, it's almost time to replace it, 3000 series are in stock and the 4000 seems just around the corner.
 
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