Porkchop Technology Review's

I’ve always been a fan of Nvidia  graphic card’s and have always purchased them, and never had any problems with them, but now it’s a different story.  I use to own the Nvidia 7900GS, and that kept crashing on me, it even fried, so I had to buy a new one, So at the time the Nvidia 8800 series graphic cards were the most popular card’s at the time, and most expensive, I decided to buy the EVEGA 8800GT superclocked edition, the card worked great for awhile, and I knew about the overheating issue, I even updated the bios from EVEGA, which was suppose to increase the fan speed automatically for the card, one issue I had with this card, which everyone had was that it ran really hot, and the fan did not move from 30% fan speed, which was not good enough for games, the temp’s would raise really high, so I usually ran the card at 50% when gaming, I did it manually with Nvidia’s Ntune software, now I use EVEGA Precession.  The first symptoms I got from this card, was the dreaded nvlddmkm.dll stopped responding and has recovered error in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, and it was very annoying, you would be in game, for a little while playing fine, then get a sound loop, black screen, and go to desktop, and a message would appear nvlddmkm.dll stopped responding and has recovered, and usually the game would crash, when this happened.  A couple things I thought to myself, why this error was happening, bad driver install, so I reinstalled the drivers, the card was overheating, so i raised the fan speed to 100%, the graphics of the game were to high, so I lowered them, I thought my Windows Vista install was messed up, I thought maybe that the graphics card that was factory overclocked was overclocked to much, so i lowered it down, to a normal 8800GT, then finally I thought my Windows Vista install was corrupt.  I tried all those things, even a reformat of Windows Vista, re-install of the game, and nothing has worked to this date even.  I know the graphics card is fine, because it plays some games perfectly fine, such as Counter-Strike: Source,  and Team Fortress 2.  Then I restored to the Internet (Google search) and put nvlddmkm.dll and the search engine was giving me, so many results, including a direct link to the official Nvidia forums with a topic regarding the crash, with over 100 pages of people saying they had this problem, if I knew about this, beforehand I wouldn’t have bought a Nvidia graphics card.

Most recently I have been getting more and more of these nvlddmkm.dll errors, now even in Counter-Strike: Source, Left 4 Dead, Quake Live, and in Unreal Tournament 2003, making some of these games unplayable.  The only game out of those that I can play is Counter-Strike: Source, Left 4 dead (I have to set the affinity in processes of l4d to CPU 1, raise the graphics card fan to 100%), Quake Live (just magically started running again fine, but sometimes has the crash)  Now recently just putting in the nvlddmkm.dll crash in google, you still get tons of pages about it, and now even people claiming to fix it, with some very ridiculous idea’s, such as running 1 ram stick, instead of 2, just to get attention, because this is a big problem, and somebody wants a fix, including myself.  The most surprising thing I saw was the Nvidia forums again, with a topic on it with around 120 pages, with people saying they have a problem, and people posting fixes, other people really angry, I even read a post about a game developer, explaining how he ran 4 computer’s running Nvidia graphic card’s, and 1 in 4 of them did not display the nvlddmkm.dll error, and how disappointed he was in this, and even some amusing posts saying, to fix this is to toss the Nvidia graphics card, and buy a ATI card.  This post can be found here http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=71260 I tried various things that people suggested that made sense, one of the major thing’s that helped was disabling multi-display in the Nvidia control panel, that worked and reduced the frequency of the driver crashing. Many people stated that they replaced parts in the PC and wasted money because none of it fixed anything, some people state they replacing some hardware fixed it.

Now the big question is, is this error is happening due to the hardware, or drivers, I believe it’s both.  I think they are making the card’s cheaper than ever, with cheaper materials than from the past, so people will have to buy a new graphics card a lot more quickly, and also the driver’s they release, don’t really do much, if you take a look at Nvidia’s driver’s there not card specific, even though they have a drop down menu to select which drivers you want to download, they are all the same, the 8800GT, will update with the 250 driver’s, I can see why they do this, they wouldn’ want to spend time on fixing the old card’s that aren’t even being made, and fixing there current latest ones so they make more money.  I have to admit though, Nvidia did add a nice update recently the Physx update.  The reason why I think it is driver’s is because the message that appears when it happen’s is “The display driver stopped responding and has recovered” which basically means that the driver rendering the video has crashed, then it restarted itself, the weird part about it is, why did the display driver crash?  I see that Windows Vista, restarts the video driver, but in probably other Window’s, such as Windows XP, if this happened it would probably just crash the game, no error would come up, so if your Nvidia Graphics card is crashing in Windows XP, most likely you will see the nvlddmkm.dll error in Windows Vista, but at least it recovers, and it doesn’t crash the whole computer.

So my conclusion on this is, when i build a new computer I am going to go with an ATI card, which I have never owned one before, I was a Nvidia fan as I said earlier.  At this time I will just hope, that there is some miracle driver Nvidia releases to fix the issue, or that in the new Windows 7, this won’t happen, or maybe Nvidia has to get its act together and release proper driver’s/hardware so these kind of errors do not happen, it really makes you angry when you want to play a game, and you get this error message coming up, and makes you a little bit afraid of buying another Nvidia graphics card.

In this video, the guy has the exact same problem I have and many other people have who own Nvidia graphic cards, he shows that when he is playing he crashes, then has to CNTRL + ALT + DELETE to the screen, then back and it’s fine for a couple more minutes, then repeat, He also has a newer card GTX 260 compared to my 8800GT.

Take a look here for possible fixes and idea’s from others More about nvlddmkm driver error…

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