Getting occasional BSODs and could use some help

[dzf]

Hello. I was recommended this website by a friend and I'm hoping you guys can help me out with these weird issues I've been experiencing for the past few months.

Bit of background: In December of last year I reinstalled Windows 10 on my custom built machine which was 2 years old at this point. Not because of any crashing issues, the computer has been running flawlessly throughout all that time, but because of a weird fTPM bug that caused my PC to stutter heavily at random intervals. I activated fTMP in my bios so that I could have a peak at Windows 11 but when I encountered the stuttering bug I immediately rolled back to windows 10. The bug persisted so I panicked and nuked my windows install. The stuttering issue once again persisted after the fresh install but eventually I figured out it was due to the fTMP feature which I then just disabled in my bios and never encountered again.

Anyway after that was settled, my computer was back to running perfectly for two months, until I got my first hard crash when playing a video game (Halo Infinite if that matters) which spewed out the error code FAULTY_HARDWARE_CORRUPTED_PAGE. I basically spent the rest of the day trying to figure out what happened, ran memtest which showed no errors, updated my gpu drivers, chipset drivers, and even updated my bios to the latest version. Once again my computer was running perfectly fine so I moved on and just assumed it was a weird hiccup. But then two months later, a few days ago, my PC hard crash yet again while I was playing Elden Ring. MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the error code this time, once again relating to some sort of memory issue and once again I went through the process of running memtest (results came out clean again), updating the gpu driver and all my motherboard drivers this time, and updating my bios to the latest version.

So my computer seems to be running stable again. I've been using it and I'm not getting any abnormalities, I can play games for hours on end without any issues. But I still have this lingering feeling that my computer will crash again, possibly months from now, because I haven't diagnosed what the problem is. Should I be worried or were these crashes just unlucky accidents? I don't know what to think. if I could replicate these crashes it would be so much easier but since I've only gotten two of them and they've been spaced so far apart it's hard to pinpoint the issue. Which is why I'm here now to ask for some insight.

tl;dr I reinstalled windows a few months ago and have since experienced two different BSOD crashes, two months apart, while playing video games. The crashes are rare but they both appear to be related to memory. memory testing tools aren't picking up any errors though. Not sure how to proceed with this. This machine has never had any crashes before this.

PC specs:
Custom built desktop
Windows 10 x64
2 year old system
CPU: 3700x
RAM: TEAMGROUP T-Force Vulcan Z DDR4 16GB Kit 3200MHz CL16 dual channel
GPU: EVGA RTX 2070 Super
Motherboard: B450 Tomahawk Max
PSU: EVGA 80+ GOLD 750W
SSD (with OS): Crucial MX500 1TB SSD
HDDs: Seagate Barracuda 7200 2TB and a 2TB WD Easystore external usb drive
Driver verifier is not enabled. Not sure how to do that.
Windows defender is the only security software in use.
No manual overclocks on any hardware, just using the default boosting features and XMP.

Things I've done:
Updated all my motherboard drivers and bios
Ran memtest (4 passes. I hear 8 is recommended but I can't run it for more than 4, that feature seems to be locked behind a paywall) and testmem5 with the anta777 extreme preset for 8 passes. No errors detected.
Ran the various recommended DISM and scan now commands. No errors or corruption found on my windows install.
Crystal diskinfo says all my drives are in "good" condition
Monitor temperature of all my hardware. Temps are all within spec.

Things I've noticed that may or may not be relevant:
Both crashes happened shortly after updating my GPU drivers.
Both crashes happened when running games that were installed on my SSD. Maybe the SSD is failing even if it appears to be healthy?

Sorry for the long post I'm just trying to cover as many bases as I can. If you need any more info then ask me and I'll gladly provide it. If you have any suggestions or further tests I can do then I'll gladly try them. Thank you.

 

[dzf]

As a both idle novices, what'd think about mobo handling DRAM voltage? iirc this is no OC matter, is more about stability. I had mine set at 1.42 somehow.. UEFI were to auto last time I entered, I think yours might as well be CMOS related.

I leave DRAM voltage up to the mobo I believe mine is at 1.38 but I'd have to go check. I never mess with any of that stuff in the bios and it hasn't been a problem for the past 2 years or so. You think the CMOS battery might be bad? I guess I could try to get a replacement but I feel like a bad CMOS would be causing much more instability than I'm experiencing.

There's definitely something that's not 100% on my machine right now but I just can't find out what it is.

 

[philc43]

Hello dzf,

I have just looked at your most recent crash dump. The bug check 0x1a with a 1st parameter of 0x31 signifies a possible hardware problem.

MEMORY_MANAGEMENT Parameters
Parameter 1 identifies the exact violation.

0x31

The image relocation fix-up table or code stream has been corrupted. This is probably a hardware error.

In your case it is the fix-up table which is corrupted:
FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: 0x1a_31_nt!MiApplyCompressedFixups

Sometimes the only way to tell if a memory module is faulty is by replacing it. In your case you can remove one of the modules one at a time a test for a period of a few days to see if the problem goes away. I realise that this may be a bit of a pain as you don't know what triggers the BSOD. Sometimes the process of removing and reinserting RAM can create a better connection. Let us know how you get on.

If you do rule out the RAM as the cause we can then focus on the SSD.

 

[dzf]

Hello dzf,

I have just looked at your most recent crash dump. The bug check 0x1a with a 1st parameter of 0x31 signifies a possible hardware problem.

MEMORY_MANAGEMENT Parameters
Parameter 1 identifies the exact violation.

0x31

The image relocation fix-up table or code stream has been corrupted. This is probably a hardware error.

In your case it is the fix-up table which is corrupted:
FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: 0x1a_31_nt!MiApplyCompressedFixups

Sometimes the only way to tell if a memory module is faulty is by replacing it. In your case you can remove one of the modules one at a time a test for a period of a few days to see if the problem goes away. I realise that this may be a bit of a pain as you don't know what triggers the BSOD. Sometimes the process of removing and reinserting RAM can create a better connection. Let us know how you get on.

If you do rule out the RAM as the cause we can then focus on the SSD.

Alright. I'll try swapping around my RAM sticks and I'll do some more memory tests during the next few days. But yeah since i can't find a way to reliably trigger the crashes this is going to continue to be a pain. I wouldn't want to run my machine with only one stick of RAM for possibly months waiting for a crash to happen haha.

 

[dzf]

Hello guys it's me again. Been testing my RAM in different layouts and have ran memtest on each stick individually with zero errors. I have installed the latest windows update and updated some drivers. So far I haven't experienced any crashes but I honestly wasn't expecting to get one, these BSODs are very anomalous

At any rate I'm still not sure if I'm closer to fixing this problem or not. Any suggestions on how I should proceed? I don't want to drag you guys into a troubleshooting rabbit hole with me so I'm thinking that I should just keep using my PC as I normally do and come back when/if it crashes again, hopefully with a new crash log that can get us closer to diagnosing the problem.

Also, I should mention that when I was unplugging my RAM sticks for the first time one of them felt wobbly. Nothing too extreme but it did feel noticeably less "tight" than the other stick. Do you think this could be the cause of my problem? Maybe if the conditions inside my case were juuuust right there would be just enough of connection interruption that it would crash the PC? Maybe a good RAM reseating was really all that I needed. I'm just throwing this out there, I guess I'll have to wait and see.

 

[dzf]

It's been a while but I'm back with another BSOD. Sorta

On Sun 5/29/2022 1:06:51 AM your computer crashed or a problem was reported
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\052922-8093-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x3F7D60)
Bugcheck code: 0x12B (0xFFFFFFFFC00002C4, 0x7F2, 0x1D682C89A80, 0xFFFFD88028FEB000)
Error: FAULTY_HARDWARE_CORRUPTED_PAGE
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that a single-bit error was found in this page. This is a hardware memory error.
This is likely to be caused by a hardware problem. This error suggests a case of memory corruption because of a hardware problem. It is suggested you do a test on your RAM modules (memory test) and make sure your system is not getting overheated. This problem might also be caused because of overheating (thermal issue).
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver that cannot be identified at this time.

So it's another FAULTY_HARDWARE_CORRUPTED_PAGE crash like the first one I had back in February except this time the crash happened when my PC was in the process of shutting down. It was one in the morning and I was going to put my computer to sleep but accidentally powered it off instead. I didn't even notice that a BSOD happened that day until today after I decided to scroll through Event Viewer and saw the crash. The computer had been running "fine" since then but I've gone through the usual again, Memtest: 4x4 Passed, Seatools long generic test on my SSD: Passed. No errors in sight.

I do have some background info on the events leading up to this crash though and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.

About 2 hours prior to shutting the PC down and getting that BSOD I was once again playing Elden Ring. The game ran perfectly fine for multiple hours non-stop until suddenly it froze up before closing and getting a Windows popup message: "Application popup: Windows - Virtual Memory Minimum Too Low : Your system is low on virtual memory. Windows is increasing the size of your virtual memory paging file. During this process, memory requests for some applications may be denied. For more information, see Help."

Sure enough when I looked at HWinfo my virtual memory hit a maximum peak of 98% usage.
So now I'm wondering if either a improperly managed or corrupt pagefile might be the cause of some of my issues? After scouring around the internet for a bit I came across some people saying that a corrupt pagefile or a pagefile being held in bad sectors of a harddrive could spew out this bugcheck. The recommendations there was to turn the pagefile completely off and then back on so that it would created on a different part of the drive, which I've done. I've also taken the liberty of setting my pagefilze size manually to 16GB, matching my RAM. I believe that by default it's set to 5GB on my system with a maximum of 20GB but I've never seen it go above 10GB, not even after that Elden Ring crash where windows automatically expanded the pagefile size did it go above 10GB.

Come to think of it Halo Infinite and Elden Ring are the only two games I've played that have ever caused BSODs on this machine for me and they both have stringent memory requirements (both of them recommend 16GB of RAM) along with loads of reported memory related issues. But it feels like a chicken before the egg situation right now: Could the excessive usage of a pagefile that's either too small to handle the workload or too damaged be the root cause of these BSODs or are these memory intensive programs exposing issues that were always there? Please if anyone has any knowledge I'd love to hear your thoughts.