Power_State_Driver_Failure BSOD
Jason Galterio
Posts: 2,562
I was wondering if anyone else has been experiencing a Power_State_Driver_Failure Blue Screen of Death while using DS?
I seem to get these, intermittently, on one of my computers. I have been able to narrow it down to something with the NVIDIA driver.
However the error only occurs while running DS. And, even then, it doesn't happen regularly. Or with any consistent stimulis. I can go a week and not get it, then suddenly get it three times in a row.
I can also run pretty graphic intensive games (Fallout 4 on max settings, for example) for hours and never once see the error.
It almost seems like it happens when I leave DS idle for too long, then start it going again. Almost like a car that hasn't had enough time to idle in the morning.
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Comments
Without details you will not get any opinions. It seems that somewhere along the line your PSU might not be sending enough power to the card. You can try a different PSU for awhile to test.
That is okay, I am not really looking for opinions for how to fix it. I was just seeing if anyone else was seeing similar symptoms. That would help me in narrowing down the specific culprit.
Right now I am not convinced that it is DS causing it. That just seems to be the common factor.
Fallout, for example, hits the GPU pretty consistently. DS's demands are more sporadic.
My investigation has led me to believe that it is either an NVIDIA driver issue or a PSU issue related to the video card.
If you have the latest driver...rollback one or two versions.
i got some BSOD with a message , something like "expool exeeds driver"
I think its nvidia driver related in my case
I was planning on doing that, but holding off until after I checked to see if anyone else was having similar issues.
My logic being... If if is a driver issue, then it would affect more people than just myself. So other DS users might have seen similar errors.
If it is a power supply issue, then most likely it's just me. And rolling back the drivers would have no effect.
This is an Alienware 17r2, with a GTX 980M. Dell already has issues with sending out the wrong power supply, but I did get them to send me the bigger 19.5 brick.
That being said, since the power supply is already suspect, I was still 50/50 on which route to take. Since the PSU issue would involve updating BIOS and such (which I already did a few months ago, and might well be the source of the current problem).
Had a quick google.. and there seems to be quite few people having the same issue... sounds like either a driver issue or BIOS, rather than DS specific.
I was about to post the same thing Jack did...
That model has both the Intel and Nvidia, right?
A lot of what I found seems to indicate that it is being caused by the Intel driver, not the Nvidia one.
I agree, Jack. I don't think it is DS causing the error. I just think it is how I am using the laptop while using DS that is causing the error. (If that makes sense.)
It does have the Intel and the NVIDIA, and I had not considered the Intel GPU could potentially be the issue. Thank you for mentioning that. I am going to check into it next.
I was focused on the NVIDIA because that was the crux of the power issue with Dell. That the NVIDIA GPU was drawing more power than the power brick could handle. And causing the system to throttle down.
I just went ahead and disabled the Intel GPU through the Device Manager. Going to experiment and see what happens.
From the ones I found...it seems that the Intel is trying to 'ramp' up while the Nvidia is currently maxed out...so there isn't enough juice to go around. Supposedly the more recent Intel drivers are better at handling power management.
If you're not using an open program for some time (not sure how long) windows memory management usually moves the RAM used by that program to the swap file. Then when you start using the program again, it may take a long time with constant disk access (depending om how much memory the program is using) before it becomes accessible again ("not responding"). Might be related to this in some way. I don't know all the details and how different amounts of RAM affect memory management, but with e.g. 8 GB it seems to happen consistently.
What you are saying makes a lot of sense and did just make something else click into place.
My C drive is an SSD. I have noticed a significant slow down at times when I try to do file functions on it. (I.e. create a new directory, copy & paste files, etc.) I assumed this to be Windows Power Management turning off the drive due to a period of idle time.
I have tried to prevent this from happening, but so far the conventional methods (do not sleep, do not shutdown hard drive, do not shutdown USB bus, etc.) seem to not make a difference.
However I never thought to associate the two conditions with each other, since they happen so sporadicly. And never together, which now makes sense if they are actually the same error just in "different clothes."
On a related note, I discovered that disabling the Intel GPU will not work. Apparently the NVIDIA GPU needs the Intel one in order to access the display and rear display port.
For anyone else that might be experiencing similar issues, this is what I did:
Under Advanced Power Settings:
Under Hard Disk: Turn off Hard Disk After: Never
Under Sleep: Sleep After: Never, Allow Hybrid Sleep: Never, Hibernate After: Never
Under USB: Selective Suspend: Never
So far it seems to be working.
Okay, my little tricks did not work. So I bit down and did the one thing that I tried to avoid... Dell / Alienware support.
I let the tech take control of my desktop and watched what they did:
1. Flashed the bios with a new driver. I had done this before, not sure if this step was necessary.
2. Rebooted.
3. Uninstalled all of my NVIDIA drivers from Add / Remove Programs.
4. Rebooted.
5. Downloaded the latest NVIDIA driver package.
6. Did a custom install of the package and made sure that "Clean Install" was selected.
7. Rebooted.
So far I have been running DS for over 2 hours without issue.