XPS-710 regular crashes under load (long sorry)

Surely you have done this with your extensive experience as a PC tech but I didn't see a mention of the following:

Make sure you have the latest NVIDIA Chipset SMBUS drivers installed.

Make sure you have the latest NVIDIA MediaShield SATA drivers installed (see latest drivers posted above in this forum by Chris).

Reset your pagefile/virtual memory settings to "system managed size" (setting to other settings has caused BSOD's and out of memory errors for me).

 

I received several BSOD's too until I installed the latest NVIDiA MediaShield after updating my system to Vista 32.

 

Hope you can figure out the problem(s) soon.

 

Best regards,

Jim

 

Is your optical drive or drives on the highest SATA ports (i.e. 5 and 4, if you have two)?

 

The Dell 7xx series systems have problems when the ODD is located in between HD's - doesn't make any sense, but I've seen it happen on all variations of the 7xx series systems.

 

Might be a long shot, but worth a try.

Hmm.... ok.. I had looked at the bus drivers and they were dated 11/06. Since I just got the system last week I would hope that the critical nature of the update would have been packaged on the new system. Downloading now to see what happens. The Media one as well was dated 04/07 so I assumed... probably wrong that that would be installed already as well.

 

I did pull my 3rd and 4th drive and no luck. I also pulled 3 gigs of memory and the one game that I was having problems with played all the way though.. but I only tested once. Added the second gig back in and got almost all the way through before it dropped out with no error message again. Going to switch chips again.

 

I also tried the system managed page file with no luck but now that I'm removing memory and such it's worth a second look.

 

Thanks

 

Keep the suggestions coming.

Ok still no luck.. did the two other updates via the previous suggestion and got the same STOP messages once the system came under load from my games. I am noticing now though that the last 4 times the NV4 display drivers have been flagged.. this is something new. Now two questions... one brought up my Mr. jsrder that made me think. jsrder you stated the whole cable routing in the case and it made me take a third look. According to the book on page 98 it says

 

"SATA hard drives should be connected to connectors labeled "HDD" on the system board. Non-Hard drive SATA devices should be attached to the connectors labeled SATA with the exception of a 5th SATA hard drive installed in a 5.25-inch drive bay, which must be connected to the SATA 0 connector."

 

Looking at my configuration the primary hard drive is attached to the SATA 0 connector which also is colored blue instead of black. So that leads me to ask.. how accurate is the documentation and IF it's correctly stated in the manual.. why the heck did the wrong device get connected to SATA 0?? My DVD single drive is connected to SATA 2 and my secondary HD is on SATA 1. Since I removed my other two drives that does in fact make the DVD the last one in the connected chain.

 

I think it's time to call Dell unless DELL-Chris can chime in here somewhere... I'm completely stumped. GRRRRRRRRRRRR

JJ,

 

For what its worth I know that both of my SATA opticals are connected first in the SATA sequence and then the HDDs.

 

Regards - MichaelO

 

Intel Core2 Duo processor E6700 1.4.1 Bios
4GB DDR2 PC2-5300 @ 667 Mhz
24 in Dell 2405FPW Wide Aspect Digital Flat Panel Display
512MB NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX
XFI w/ Logitech Z-5450 5.1
1 x 300 SATA root
2 x 250GB SATA
1 x 320 SATA Seagate perpendicular Storage Technology

Ok.. so here's the scoop although I've got some more testing to do. I did in fact call XPS support and went through the whole sequence of events. The tech attached to my machine and I showed him what was happening in the logs... really nothing there as most of the errors never logged. He checked a few things then suggested that I turn off the dual-core support in the BIOS and try my games and stuff again. Ok.. I've heard of incompatabilities with some video cards and drivers for the older Hyperthreading machines however I've never had that problem with my Gen-1 XPS which is hyperthreading. Same basic software configurations between the two systems down to the drive letters that I've installed them on. My GEN-1 XPS though runs an ATI Radeon card though.

 

So.. I do like the guy says and turn off dual core support and go back into the system and run my game... start to finish the game runs like a charm. Since it works fine on my GEN-1 XPS I didn't notice any degredation with the second core turned off. Ok so since my games and stuff all work again.. at least the one time I played them then what does that say? Tech said that it's a known issue where they've had a number of customers with the same issues and turning off the second core seems to "fix" the problem. WHAT!!!! .. I bought this system for the dual-core and horsepower on purpose because I do a lot of Adobe Premeire video editing and the second core is a must for anything lengthy.. not to mention the rendering time to create a DVD. So I've got a case number and I'm going to play my game a couple more times to see if I can get it to drop out again. With the second core off though this is the first time with the extra RAM that I've actually played any game scenario end to end with no crashes. Hmmmmmm..... Will keep everyone informed.

Murphy caught up to me after my last post... who hates his laws... grrr.. second play through and the games dropped out with no error messages once again. Tech said I need to run the full extended diagnostic tests and then if they all pass (which they did earlier) then it's back to software.... See I told you they would have me image the machine. Three days of installing my applications and configuring them and not even getting a chance to launch and run any of them and I've got to start from scratch again.

 

Maybe I'll return this system and go back to my origional XPS... it may be slow but at least it runs all my applications and games.

Thanks for the links.. .I elmininated my potential for it being a memory problem last night by pulling all my memory. I installed it back in in 1 gig chunks and it failed right off the top with only 2 gigs installed. I swapped chips to make sure I didn't have a bad SIMM but no luck. Seemed to actually be more stable with only 1 gig installed in it though.. I'm convinced at this point it's a system board and possible timing/addressing issue with the memory as I was getting pagefile.sys errors as well when copying file across drives in large blocks... it's not just with games where errors are. Ran the Dell diags and everything checks out ok BUT those diagnositics aren't addressing memory the same way the diags do. I'm stuck with reimaging today though because I tried to reinstall XP on top of itself and it won't let me logon now because it says I have to activate Windows. Since the network driver has now been bumped I can't connect to the home network to activate. Such is life. I could have built my own machine and had it up and running in the time I've spent troubleshooting out of box issues with this machine. Highly considering returning this thing and sticking with my slow but working machine.

Sorry to hear you're still struggling with your system.  Definitely frustrating for sure!  I thought my earlier suggestions of installing MB/chipset drivers would work.  It certainly fixed a lot of problems I was having with my XPS710H2C with the Vista OS installed.

 

Here's a link to a site that might fix your memory problems and CTD's with games.  Although it talks about Vista, XP users have stated it works for them too.  It simply modifies your game so that the application can handle >2GB memory addresses.  I think it's an excellent tweak and it certainly increased my enjoyment of Microsoft's Flight Simulator X and frame rates..

 

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=e0f1022be8d23f36aeb525b23b5db11c&t=89138

 

Best regards,

Jim

New system board and video card are on it's way. I completely stripped the system reformatted and reinstalled XP. I only ran the critical updates from Microsoft Update and didn't even install my AV or internet security software. No luck.. crashed pretty easily with the same generic page fault messages as before. Let's cross our fingers that the first two pieces replaced fix the problem.

UPDATE:

Ok.. system board and video should be here tomorrow. I starting reloading all my applications a second time on the system though to not have this thing sitting idle while I'm waiting. I figured most of the problems were with playing games anyway so it shouldn't hurt to reinstall my apps. WRONG!!!... I reinstalled Office on my system then when it asked me to reboot at the end I said no since I like to manually launch IE and check for updates myself. So I say no and click start and IE and what happens ? BSOD with an 8e error. I power the thing off .. wait 30 seconds then power back on and the BIOS won't load. I get a 23 error code on the front panel which says that there is a hard drive problem. Ok maybe I turned it off and on too fast and the HD didn't spin down all the way. I power off and on again and it boots. Few more applications later and I decide to make a duplicate of my digital photos folder from one drive to another to organize things a little. 50gig of data total about 17000 files. I decide to use Microsoft SyncToy to do the file compare and transfer as it works really well on my other machine. About 4000 files through the copy and another BSOD. The system this time though comes up after logon and says it's recovered from a serious error... cool because at least this time there's a log entry. Log entry says that there is a problem with sbp2port and that a device didn't respond in a timely manor. Hmm... do some cross checking and find that the device didn't respond in the 10 second timeframe. Weird as nothing froze on my system. Two possiblities for the sbp2port error. USB device having problem... of which I have no USB devices other than the mouse which has already been changed... and a possible hard drive problem. Having checked my HD's several times I'm leaning toward a drive controller problem or a problem with the driver that is controlling the controller. The SMBus driver has already been updated so I can't get anything newer. I've seen some posts about the X-Fi sound card though and a possible problem with the nForce chip set. If the new system board tomorrow doesn't fix the problem then I'm pulling the sound card and going with the onboard to see if that works.

 

Hopefully if you're still following this and having problems with your own system that this helps. I've noticed quite a few people out there with the same BSOD problems on the 700 series machines.

FINAL UPDATE:

Ok the hardware tech came out on Monday and replaced the system board and the video card. Haven't had time to update the post until now as I've spent the last couple late night playing games :) YEAH!!!! finally fixed. I'm sure it was the drive controller on the system board that was causing problems even though we replaced the video card as well. I had started getting SPB2PORT errors in the event logs that suggested that a device wasn't responding or there was an HD problem. No HD problem which lead me to suspect the controller. Anyway.. all is fixed now and I'm happy. (Now to transfer all my digital video over from tape to the new system... ugg)