DirectX Apps causing spontaneous, intermittent reboot?

jackcorbae · Post by **jackcorbae** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 8:28 am

Dragon Age and The Sims 3 have both started displaying an annoying problem - spontaneous complete system reboot!

No warning and no error logs (that I can find). Just a complete system reboot.

Ubuntu 9.10 AMD64 with an NVidia GTX 260 - first noticed with Wine 1.1.41 with Dragon Age and then 1.1.42 with Dragon Age and the Sims 3. The Sims 3 was installed via PlayOnLinux.

Evil Jay · Post by **Evil Jay** » Sat Apr 17, 2010 8:48 am

On 04/17/2010 08:28 AM, jackcorbae wrote:

Dragon Age and The Sims 3 have both started displaying an annoying problem - spontaneous complete system reboot!

No warning and no error logs (that I can find). Just a complete system reboot.

Ubuntu 9.10 AMD64 with an NVidia GTX 260 - first noticed with Wine 1.1.41 with Dragon Age and then 1.1.42 with Dragon Age and the Sims 3. The Sims 3 was installed via PlayOnLinux.

Ouch. I had that problem one time, and after months of troubleshooting
it as a potential Wine or video driver issue, it unfortunately it turned
out to be a defective EVGA video card (why I never buy that brand anymore).

No software problem, short of the most extreme driver issue, should
cause Linux to reboot like that. A good test would be to install
Sauerbraten. Play it for a little bit and see if you get the same
issue. It was the only native Linux game I could find that stressed the
card enough to consistently cause the same reboots when I was
experiencing them. At the very least, that will potentially tell you
that there's a problem outside of Wine.

Good Luck!
-J

jackcorbae · Post by **jackcorbae** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 7:16 am

Oddly enough - today I tried running The Sims 3 in windowed mode.

Played it for several hours without a single reboot. Even left it running while I wandered off and did other things. No problems.

So it is only when running in fullscreen mode.

Will try 1.1.43 tomorrow and see if that makes a difference.

vitamin · Post by **vitamin** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 11:35 am

Evil Jay wrote:I had that problem one time, and after months of troubleshooting it as a potential Wine or video driver issue, it unfortunately it turned out to be a defective EVGA video card (why I never buy that brand anymore).

Most hi-end cards are made by one manufacturer and sold with different stickers by everyone else. They all have same chances to fail. This applies to both AMD & nVidia.

Also keep in mind nVidia had huge batches of improperly assembled chips (faulty interconnects) that would fail after some period of time. Especially if being overheated. All vendors had issues with them, including Dell and HP. Just blaming EVGA (which does some-what decent cards) not correct.

I had MSI card that fail because of nVidia chip died (worked fine in 2D, instant lockup/reboot in 3D).

All depends on how good the card is (if it's any different then reference design) and how good the service is (how much effort does it take to replace/fix failed card).

3vi1 · Post by **3vi1** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 12:22 pm

vitamin wrote:Most hi-end cards are made by one manufacturer and sold with different stickers by everyone else. They all have same chances to fail. This applies to both AMD & nVidia.

Also keep in mind nVidia had huge batches of improperly assembled chips (faulty interconnects) that would fail after some period of time. Especially if being overheated. All vendors had issues with them, including Dell and HP. Just blaming EVGA (which does some-what decent cards) not correct.

Every company needs to take responsibility for their own quality control. In the case I experienced, EVGA was not acknowledging there was a widespread issue even though many others were reporting the same issue. Many people RMA'd their cards and received replacement cards that had the same issue.

So, no, EVGA doesn't get a free pass on this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductRe ... 6814130330

vitamin · Post by **vitamin** » Sun Apr 18, 2010 11:26 pm

3vi1 wrote:Every company needs to take responsibility for their own quality control. In the case I experienced, EVGA was not acknowledging there was a widespread issue even though many others were reporting the same issue. Many people RMA'd their cards and received replacement cards that had the same issue.

This is not new. It's a problem for pretty much all manufacturers. For the best examples see Apple and Toyota. And even if you lucky and got your stuff RMA-ed it goes through people who have much less knowledge in computers you do.

Most companies won't acknowledge there is something wrong with stuff they are selling. Accept if required by the law. And even then some will do anything to still hide it.