Black Screen Crash issue

[Kroll]

Hi Everyone,
Like other folks, I have recently begun experiencing the black screen/crash with DDO.

It started for me about 1-2 weeks ago. Was infrequent at first, happening about ever 2-3 hours but it has since become more frequent - I'm barely in game for 5 minutes before it occurs now.
As far as "where" it happens there doesn't appear to be much of a pattern. It happens in all zones, city zones, wilderness zones and in quests. I can be in the thick of action or just standing there at the AH. Same result - black screen crash that I can't recover from (need to reboot the system).

My system specs below:
Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 @ 2.26 GHz
Windows Vista Home Premium, 64 bit (service pack 2)
Nvidia GeForce 9800M GTS w/1024MB DDR3 vid ram (DirectX version 11.0)
Using GeForce display driver v 195.62
4 gig RAM

At this point the game has become unplayable and it's too bad cuz I'm a monthly subscribing VIP. If I can't get a resolution in the next couple days I expect to be cancelling my account - no point in paying if I can't play right?

If anyone can assist I would really appreciate it.
I downloaded and installed RivaTuner so if you need me to run some tests I can.
Thanks in advance.

[Missing_Minds]

Your 9800 will use dx 10 max, but that is besides the point.

How old is your 9800? That honestly sounds like a dying card to me. And if it is, Riva won't help you at all.

If you can slap it a known working nvida card, you can see if it is game or hardware.

Could even be RAM. I know I had sticks go bad without warning. Similar symptoms also.

[Kroll]

I should also point out, this is a laptop.
The 9800 isn't that old - I bought the machine a little over a year ago and it has performed quite well with pretty much all games.

Haven't really determined if RAM is the issue or not but I'm assuming that if I have bad RAM the system wouldn't recognize it correct? All of the diagnostics still show 4 gigs.

[Missing_Minds]

I should also point out, this is a laptop.
The 9800 isn't that old - I bought the machine a little over a year ago and it has performed quite well with pretty much all games.

Haven't really determined if RAM is the issue or not but I'm assuming that if I have bad RAM the system wouldn't recognize it correct? All of the diagnostics still show 4 gigs.

The system diags wouldn't show you squat about your RAMs behavior. Use this to test it.
http://www.memtest.org/

As for your 9800 not being old... Given that the 9800 runs hot to begin with and laptops have noctorious bad cooling, I'm pretty certain it is fried.
Using Riva, look at what your idle temps are and then what the temps are under DDO actively for as long as you can. My guess is you'll find your idle in the 60C range and game play jumps to 80C. If so, given that you've been playing games under those conditions for a year, the sucker is fried.

Do a search on "nvidia defect, black screen" You are going to find you are not alone. Welcome to hardware defects, hope your laptop is still under warranty. If not, ouch... my condolences.

It started for me about 1-2 weeks ago. Was infrequent at first, happening about ever 2-3 hours but it has since become more frequent - I'm barely in game for 5 minutes before it occurs now.

Your line here indicates hardware failure or successively worse file corruption of game files. I'm more prone to believe the first. I went through the same description, and it was my GPU.

[Kroll]

idle core temp is around 40 C.
while in game it jumped up to about 50 pretty quickly then slowly inched up to around 60 and held around there (+/1 1-2 degrees) for a long while.
Running a test right now - about 15 minutes in the highest coretemp I got was 65 degrees.

I'm not convinced the vid card is fried however I will look into it further.

Any other suggestions on what I can look at?
Thanks for the help btw.

[RottinBob]

I haven't even seen anyone ask you if the card runs fine in other games? How about other games running period? I agree with Missing_Minds on checking your memory. But... if you aren't getting BSOD's or random computer shutdowns or similar behavior, I wouldn't chalk it up to a hardware issue just yet. Another thing you could try, it may or may not work, is getting rid of your pagefile, restarting, set the pagefile size and restart one more time to clear out your pagefile.

Either way, test the usual suspects. If you ran other games fine, the video card should be alright, but I still would also run a memory test to clear your ram. Hell, you may just need a hd defrag.