Nvlddmkm stopped responding is getting VERY OLD...

[AdamK47]

I had the Nvlddmkm Stopped Responding error back when I was testing out an overclock with my previous memory, 4GB (4 x 1GB) of Patriot PC6400 @ 1050 DDR. As soon as I bumped up the clock speed I started receiving the error in Crysis. I put the memory back down to 1000 and the problem cleared right up. I'm now running new 4GB (2 x 2GB) Corsair PC6400 at 1050 DDR and have yet to see the error pop up.

[$n][pErMan]

Intersting... but what do you all think is the reason for me never getting the error in Vista 32-bit but getting it in 64-bit? One would think if it was a hardware error it would be repeatable in both OS's as they both have DX10. Would Vista 64-bit being able to use all 4GB of my memory do it... or would nvidia drivers be responsible in this case? I hope to have time to run memtest tonight and see if I get any errors in that.

[hell_of_doom227]

Certain Bios rev for video cad don't have this problems. I learned that anything after Evga Bios rev 2 for regular 8800GTX might or might not cause this...so if you have original rev 1 or rev 2 bios, that's gonna fix it.

[$n][pErMan]

According to GPUz I have BIOS version 60.80.0A.00.01. Not sure what that means... any one able to check their BIOS on a GTX who does NOT have the error and post? Also if you have GPUz you can save the BIOS... perhaps I can use someone elses GTX BIOS who has a newer version without the error and flash the card myself?

[Dragunov]

Well, I still search for a newer BIOS version for my MSI 8800GTS 640MB, cause want to see if I'm more safe for this error (didn't get it for some time now *crosses fingers*)

[slaWter]

60.80.06.00.02 here.
Maybe I'll try to update the BIOS this weekend.

[Dragunov]

Had this without playing the game, two times today

Screen went black and returned and I got the error

BIOS version: 60.80.07.00.02

[$n][pErMan]

Had this without playing the game, two times today

Screen went black and returned and I got the error

BIOS version: 60.80.07.00.02
That sucks... did you flash ur BIOS? Or is this on the BIOS you claimed above that had been running good for awhile?

[Dragunov]

Those running good for a while

But it seems nvflash 5.57 only wants to write *.ROM, not *.BIN, but all the BIOS versions are in *.BIN

Rebooted, had this error again, maybe heating issue, cause the pc is already running for 24 hours

[Quick209]

Hello everyone,

I am new to the forums here but not to computers or this issue. November 07 I built a beast. SLI 8800 XFX 320MB 320-bit throughput on an EVGA 680i motherboard. I am packing 4 gigz of 1066MHZ OCZ Reaper ram and Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor. I also run Vista Ultimate 64bit. Needless to sat I have a beast from hell and back. What urked me for months has been the error you guys have been getting in games. In fact, I even got them in directx 9C games like Call of Juarez and The Witcher demo. My Bioshock eventually started acting up over time. The longer my machine burned in, the worse it got with this. I seem to see one trend between everyone that is common, we all are SLI and we all run 1066MHZ Ram.

Well, after so much research and cursing Vista and their changes I seem to may have a cure for myself and would like to share. This is not an invitation to flame me if this does not work or does not sound like the cure for you, people here are trying to help and would like to play all their games effortlessly so flaming help will only result in not getting answers.

With that said, recently my new beast did something new when turning it on, it started complaining about memory errors. Yelp, no POST and the motherboard read error C1. I spent one night cursing the ground OCZ and EVGA stood on for lousy engineering until I found 1 little post out there that shined light. I tried 1 stick in slot 0 at a time and found out my machine booted up fine but still had issues with the nvlddmkm driver in certain games but trying to fill the other slots resulted in no boot. The post I found read that sometimes the motherboard is not putting off enough power for the RAM type.

By default my MB puts off 1.8v to the DRAM. Seeing I am running overclockers RAM anyway with huge heatpumps I decided to give something a try. I upped my RAM voltage. After getting to 2V my machine was powering up with 2 gigs of RAM. Going higher would produce no post. To finalize this, I ended up upping my RAM voltage to 2.225V and machine was able to power up on all 4 gigs. Something else happened in the process though, I was able to play The Witcher Demo all the way through with no issues, not 1 single glitch. After 5 hours I still have no issues. I have yet to test out BioShock but I am confident my issue is resolved.

Another test was I read someone downclocked their RAM. I did this and was able to be stable at 2V on the RAM and 800MHZ for the speed. Hmm, I think MB manufacturers may need to rethink their default specs for certain RAM speeds as this is methods used by overclockers to produce stability and I am having to do this to produce stability on standard setup.

Only thing I can think of is because Vista uses RAM for video memory also is why this issue is happening where the timing is necessary seeing it uses TDM. On XP this is not an issue since it is used on your video card mainly and I don't see any setting for timeout in XP.

Also wanted to add I am running the newest version of the EVGA bios, P32.

[$n][pErMan]

Hello everyone,

I am new to the forums here but not to computers or this issue. November 07 I built a beast. SLI 8800 XFX 320MB 320-bit throughput on an EVGA 680i motherboard. I am packing 4 gigz of 1066MHZ OCZ Reaper ram and Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor. I also run Vista Ultimate 64bit. Needless to sat I have a beast from hell and back. What urked me for months has been the error you guys have been getting in games. In fact, I even got them in directx 9C games like Call of Juarez and The Witcher demo. My Bioshock eventually started acting up over time. The longer my machine burned in, the worse it got with this. I seem to see one trend between everyone that is common, we all are SLI and we all run 1066MHZ Ram.

Well, after so much research and cursing Vista and their changes I seem to may have a cure for myself and would like to share. This is not an invitation to flame me if this does not work or does not sound like the cure for you, people here are trying to help and would like to play all their games effortlessly so flaming help will only result in not getting answers.

With that said, recently my new beast did something new when turning it on, it started complaining about memory errors. Yelp, no POST and the motherboard read error C1. I spent one night cursing the ground OCZ and EVGA stood on for lousy engineering until I found 1 little post out there that shined light. I tried 1 stick in slot 0 at a time and found out my machine booted up fine but still had issues with the nvlddmkm driver in certain games but trying to fill the other slots resulted in no boot. The post I found read that sometimes the motherboard is not putting off enough power for the RAM type.

By default my MB puts off 1.8v to the DRAM. Seeing I am running overclockers RAM anyway with huge heatpumps I decided to give something a try. I upped my RAM voltage. After getting to 2V my machine was powering up with 2 gigs of RAM. Going higher would produce no post. To finalize this, I ended up upping my RAM voltage to 2.225V and machine was able to power up on all 4 gigs. Something else happened in the process though, I was able to play The Witcher Demo all the way through with no issues, not 1 single glitch. After 5 hours I still have no issues. I have yet to test out BioShock but I am confident my issue is resolved.

Another test was I read someone downclocked their RAM. I did this and was able to be stable at 2V on the RAM and 800MHZ for the speed. Hmm, I think MB manufacturers may need to rethink their default specs for certain RAM speeds as this is methods used by overclockers to produce stability and I am having to do this to produce stability on standard setup.

Only thing I can think of is because Vista uses RAM for video memory also is why this issue is happening where the timing is necessary seeing it uses TDM. On XP this is not an issue since it is used on your video card mainly and I don't see any setting for timeout in XP.

Also wanted to add I am running the newest version of the EVGA bios, P32.
Hmmm.. interesting idea. The only problem in my case is I am already running my RAM at 2.15V and I don't have SLi :p However, you got me thinking... I never had the error on Vista 32-bit but do on 64-bit now. Perhaps its because all 4gigs are able to be used now and that is just enough to make it unstable at 2.15V on the RAM. My RAM apparently is under warranty till 2.4V (god I love OCZ OC RAM) so I might try to up the voltage just a little bit and see what that does. At this point I am willing to try everything. Keep us posted man :)

[slaWter]

Like I said, I think it could be memory related. Never got this error with 2x1GB RAM but now with 4x1GB FSX crashes in DX10 mode. vdimm is at 2.1V.

I'll try it again with 2x1GB next week or so just to find out if it really has something to do with this.

[$n][pErMan]

Like I said, I think it could be memory related. Never got this error with 2x1GB RAM but now with 4x1GB FSX crashes in DX10 mode. vdimm is at 2.1V.

I'll try it again with 2x1GB next week or so just to find out if it really has something to do with this.
have you tried upping the memory voltage yet with 4 sticks?

[Quick209]

All day and no issues in any games. I still get crashes but not related to the nvlddmkm issue. Crysis crashes in 64bit mode but I think that is a bug in the game as I seen this complaint everywhere and I haven't gotten this mode to work since first building the machine. Framerates have increased in Crysis 32 bit with DX10. I guess the RAM issue was probably producing errors dropping my frames. Not much frame increase but the benchmark shows a change from norm. :D

Bioshock works great, don't go to 1.1 though. After upgrading to 1.1 it crashes left and right. It could be because my copy of it is from Direct 2 Drive and the patch may not be patching it right or the patch is fubar'ed. The original install works awesome.

Played The Witcher demo through again and it ran without a hitch. :D

So, aside from normal bugs, this issue is resolved for me for the time being with adding more voltage to provide stability. If anyone else tries this and it works for them please post success here so when people are searching for answers they can have a fix out there. Also, if enough people report success maybe it can become a sticky to eliminate repeated posts but need other users to validate this as a fix for them also. (nana2)

[slaWter]

[pErMan']have you tried upping the memory voltage yet with 4 sticks?

Not yet. I had enough memory trouble last year with the 680i BS board. I'll try it with 2 sticks first...

[$n][pErMan]

All day and no issues in any games. I still get crashes but not related to the nvlddmkm issue. Crysis crashes in 64bit mode but I think that is a bug in the game as I seen this complaint everywhere and I haven't gotten this mode to work since first building the machine. Framerates have increased in Crysis 32 bit with DX10. I guess the RAM issue was probably producing errors dropping my frames. Not much frame increase but the benchmark shows a change from norm. :D

Bioshock works great, don't go to 1.1 though. After upgrading to 1.1 it crashes left and right. It could be because my copy of it is from Direct 2 Drive and the patch may not be patching it right or the patch is fubar'ed. The original install works awesome.

Played The Witcher demo through again and it ran without a hitch. :D

So, aside from normal bugs, this issue is resolved for me for the time being with adding more voltage to provide stability. If anyone else tries this and it works for them please post success here so when people are searching for answers they can have a fix out there. Also, if enough people report success maybe it can become a sticky to eliminate repeated posts but need other users to validate this as a fix for them also. (nana2)
Not sure if I will get to it today.. but I will try upping my voltage on the RAM and report back sometime this week :)

[haloeighty8]

Very insightful post Quick209. You know the funny thing is, I had ran this system same exact one with 2 gigs of the listed ram in my sig and NEVER once had that issue. It wasn't until I made the transition to 4 gigs of crucial ballistix tracers on around 11/07 it worked great up until roughly 2 weeks ago. And then boom.. all of a sudden I started with the infamous error, I was ready to blame my son for installing something or perhaps getting a virus on my system but looks like I was wrong.

As some of posted, I truly believe this is a memory related error of some sort. I've read everything from a failing 680i northbridge which some believe is the cause of this to the 680 board just frying ram.

I've went ahead and picked up a Striker II today, now I plan to run this at 4 gigs with 2x2gb sticks and see how this goes. As you can imagine I was very apprehensive to go back to a nvidia board as I had pointed to it as the culprit but that doesn't seem to be the case. So well see, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it doesn't happen again.

[slaWter]

I don't think it's an 680i issue because Intel chipsets are also affected. I think it has more to do with using 4 RAM sticks...

EDIT: Just ordered a 2x2GB DDR2 1000 memory kit. Maybe that'll help. If it won't I'm going for 8GB :p

[$n][pErMan]

I don't think it's an 680i issue because Intel chipsets are also affected. I think it has more to do with using 4 RAM sticks...

EDIT: Just ordered a 2x2GB DDR2 1000 memory kit. Maybe that'll help. If it won't I'm going for 8GB :p
As I said though.. it might be more than just having 4 gigs... because when I had 4gigs in Vista 32-bit I NEVER had the issue.. it was only when I made the switch to 64-bit it showed up. I still need to try upping the voltage from 2.1V to 2.2V and see if that does anything. Keep us posted though if having 2 sticks for 4gigs instead of 4 sticks does anything...

[slaWter]

[pErMan']As I said though.. it might be more than just having 4 gigs... because when I had 4gigs in Vista 32-bit I NEVER had the issue.. it was only when I made the switch to 64-bit it showed up. I still need to try upping the voltage from 2.1V to 2.2V and see if that does anything. Keep us posted though if having 2 sticks for 4gigs instead of 4 sticks does anything...

Sure, I'll report back.
btw. I had FSX working in DX10 in Vista x64 with two sticks (2x1GB), completed lots of Acceleration missions that way and played for hours without crashes.

[$n][pErMan]

Sure, I'll report back.
btw. I had FSX working in DX10 in Vista x64 with two sticks (2x1GB), completed lots of Acceleration missions that way and played for hours without crashes.
Wow... good to know. I am going to try the Voltage route and report back... I can't see myself taking 2gigs of ram out just to play FSX... will become a pain in the ass if I decide to play another game.

[slaWter]

Got the memory today and 2x2GB doesn't help :(
But I've noticed something else. I tried different vdimm settings like Quick209 suggested.

2.10V -> hard lock after around 20min
2.15V -> Nvlddmkm error message during the third flight, after around 45min (all three flights)

I'm now at 2.20V but I don't have anymore time to test that as well. Gonna try it this evening or tomorrow...

Update:
Just did a 20min and a 25min flight without the error. Memory is at 2.20V. So far so good...

[$n][pErMan]

I'm now at 2.20V but I don't have anymore time to test that as well. Gonna try it this evening or tomorrow...

Update:
Just did a 20min and a 25min flight without the error. Memory is at 2.20V. So far so good...
Is that with 4 sticks or 2 sticks? Would it be possible for you to test this on 4 sticks and report back? Id love to test this myself but I am not going to have time till the weekend :(

[slaWter]

[pErMan']Is that with 4 sticks or 2 sticks? Would it be possible for you to test this on 4 sticks and report back? Id love to test this myself but I am not going to have time till the weekend :(

That's with 2 sticks (2x2GB). Unfortunately I can't test it again with 4 1GB sticks , sorry (school exams).

Update: FSX crashed after 15min in DX10 even with 2.20V vdimm :(
VGA BIOS update would be the next thing to test but I got warning messages the last time I've tried it so I'll wait for the GX2 :p
I'll try it with 2x1GB this weekend because it worked flawlessly with 2GB.

[sedryn]

Hello everyone,

I am new to the forums here but not to computers or this issue. November 07 I built a beast. SLI 8800 XFX 320MB 320-bit throughput on an EVGA 680i motherboard. I am packing 4 gigz of 1066MHZ OCZ Reaper ram and Q6600 Core 2 Quad processor. I also run Vista Ultimate 64bit. Needless to sat I have a beast from hell and back. What urked me for months has been the error you guys have been getting in games. In fact, I even got them in directx 9C games like Call of Juarez and The Witcher demo. My Bioshock eventually started acting up over time. The longer my machine burned in, the worse it got with this. I seem to see one trend between everyone that is common, we all are SLI and we all run 1066MHZ Ram.

Well, after so much research and cursing Vista and their changes I seem to may have a cure for myself and would like to share. This is not an invitation to flame me if this does not work or does not sound like the cure for you, people here are trying to help and would like to play all their games effortlessly so flaming help will only result in not getting answers.

With that said, recently my new beast did something new when turning it on, it started complaining about memory errors. Yelp, no POST and the motherboard read error C1. I spent one night cursing the ground OCZ and EVGA stood on for lousy engineering until I found 1 little post out there that shined light. I tried 1 stick in slot 0 at a time and found out my machine booted up fine but still had issues with the nvlddmkm driver in certain games but trying to fill the other slots resulted in no boot. The post I found read that sometimes the motherboard is not putting off enough power for the RAM type.

By default my MB puts off 1.8v to the DRAM. Seeing I am running overclockers RAM anyway with huge heatpumps I decided to give something a try. I upped my RAM voltage. After getting to 2V my machine was powering up with 2 gigs of RAM. Going higher would produce no post. To finalize this, I ended up upping my RAM voltage to 2.225V and machine was able to power up on all 4 gigs. Something else happened in the process though, I was able to play The Witcher Demo all the way through with no issues, not 1 single glitch. After 5 hours I still have no issues. I have yet to test out BioShock but I am confident my issue is resolved.

Another test was I read someone downclocked their RAM. I did this and was able to be stable at 2V on the RAM and 800MHZ for the speed. Hmm, I think MB manufacturers may need to rethink their default specs for certain RAM speeds as this is methods used by overclockers to produce stability and I am having to do this to produce stability on standard setup.

Only thing I can think of is because Vista uses RAM for video memory also is why this issue is happening where the timing is necessary seeing it uses TDM. On XP this is not an issue since it is used on your video card mainly and I don't see any setting for timeout in XP.

Also wanted to add I am running the newest version of the EVGA bios, P32.


Thanks Quick!
Yes, uping my voltage on my RAM ended my problems once and for all. You rock! :nana: