Larian Studios Forums Dragon Commander Dragon Commander - Beta Blue Screen - Video Card Crash?

OK, now I had DC running in the background (alt-tab to Firefox), with a few websites open (Divinity: OS, DC, and SC), along with Star Citizen Chat Roll. I closed most screens, and had only SC Chatroll open (with DC still running in the background). I had just selected a website Sixsense (.com?)... and my monitors started to go crazy (blacking on and off slowly). Then I get a blue screen of death and it dumped to memory.

I was able to restart my computer, but I'm extremely worried that it could happen again if I run DC (in the background or not). I don't want to destroy my video card.

Hardware problems can cause blue screen errors, but a software crash is not going to damage hardware. My my old computer would have long since burst into flames if that were the case (the reset button on the front bezel broke long ago, and I have to jab something in the hole to hit the reset switch on the case itself). Between Windows problems (Win95/98/XP), regular software problems, beta testing, bad/flaky hardware, etc, I've had lots of hard lockups and blue screen errors, without that causing any hardware problems. I did have a video card die on me once, but that was because it found out the warranty had expired 3 months previous, not because the computer had been crashing or even had the video being stressed.

What does http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html says?

Since XP (definitely since Vista, I think), BSODs are usually caused by faulty hardware (e.g. bad memory) or driver issues.
Download the tool linked by Kein and google for a list of Stop Codes, that might give you some first idea what caused the BSOD.
That being said, it can still be hard to track down the ultimate cause for a BSOD.

Some time ago, I had trouble with BSODs after buying some additional memory, yet even extensive testing of the ram sticks didn't show any issues. Eventually I was able to solve it by swapping the position of new and old memory sticks on the mainboard...
My most recent case was caused by a driver installation. Luckily I remembered which driver was likely to blame, so I could solve it by re-installing an older driver version.

I used to have some frustrating BSODs caused by overheating. Had my CPU cleaned up and all was solved.

Thanks for the BSVer, I never knew it existed. It hasn't happened since, but I haven't run DDC since then either.

It looks like it's a DirectX issue. Someone else mentioned it occurred when they tried to play video (http://www.sevenforums.com/bsod-hel...vlddmkm-sys-dxgkrnl-sys-dxgmms1-sys.html). As far as I know, DDC was the only program that could be considered 'video' at the time of the crash, even though it was running in the background.

It also recommends updating to the current nVidia drivers... but I'm hesitant because I've heard from others that 320.?? hasn't been officially recommended (outside of nVidia) yet. I'm currently running nVidia 314.22, which was stable as far as I knew.

Running 320.14 for a month now, everything seems to be fine.