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Stability Problems - processes die

UncleJoe
Level 7
Hi, I'm getting very annoying crashes after upgrading. The strange thing is that it only happens when I play BF3, but not in other demanding games like Crysis 3. When I first upgraded, BF3 would either crash in game or briefly after exiting with a Windows 8 blue screen: A critical process has died. A few months later and after a lot of software updates, the crashes still occur, but instead of a blue screen, I get massive audio stuttering for a few seconds (probably from the audio mixer dying), followed by no audio at all, no fancy themed Windows (probably the desktop compositor dying), and inability to close & start programs. The occurrence of these crashes is about ever few hours.

I've run MemTest+ and Prime 95 torture test (using 12GiB RAM) overnight and neither show a problem.

I've kept almost all my previous hardware and only upgraded the processor and motherboard (Core I5 750, Gigabyte HM57 --> Core I7 4770, Maximus VI). I also have the latest BIOS, GTX 680 and Realtek audio drivers.

Has anyone else experienced this or can suggest how to fix it? Do you think this is a hardware problem, a software problem, or an unfortunate combination?

Thanks for helping
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2 REPLIES 2

Yes, I did fresh reinstall of WIndows. I also did a system file check and BF3 checksum test

One suspicion I have is with the audio drivers since it's the first to go bad (massive stuttering). But after the audio dies, the graphics are still fine (NVIDIA drivers have always been the gold standard for reliability 🙂 ) Has anyone encountered crashes due to Realtek audio drivers?