Win 7 BSOD Help

[watercooled]

I was just reading through the forums in Firefox and I got a BSOD, under Windows 7. I cheched in event viewer and found this:

What could have caused this, everything is stock??
Thanks

Edit: I just wanted to add I've Googled for 0x124 BSOD but I can't find much apart from a few references to hard drives so I ran HD Tune to see if I could get it to happen again. It didn't but the benchmark looks a bit odd, erratic read speed and access time:

[Jasp]

Benchmark looks fine to me, could just be a random BSOD, it is still a new operating system and we are in effect beta testers.

[watercooled]

Yeah that's what I thought. Just concerned as it's a new build. I've run a few stress tests and it hasn't happened again but I'll run memtest tomorrow to be sure.
Thanks

[Paul Adams]

STOP 0x124 translates to "uncorrectable hardware error" and is raised by the device itself, not the OS.
The device in question is recorded in the event (which is why you can see hits for 0x124 for disks when the problem was the I/O method set in the BIOS, or from things like NICs when the system is resuming from sleep and the driver thinks the device timed out during wake, etc.).

From the clues in the event you can see it's the CPU reporting its cache had some problem (corruption, failure to write/read).

Is this the first time you've run a 64-bit OS on this system?
A 64-bit capable CPU running a 32-bit OS doesn't "stretch" the system in the same way, so sometimes when you go native 64-bit you can uncover problems you never encountered before with the hardware.

The problem with (intermittent or rare) processor problems, especially cache-related ones, is that (if it's not related directly to temperature) they can be a nightmare to reproduce on demand - tradtitional CPU and memory stress testing do not have to uncover them.

[watercooled]

It's happened only once and this PC is less than a week old and it's only ever run 64 bit OSes. What do you think I should be about it? RMA the CPU?
Thanks

Edit: Hmm, look at the HDD benchmark again - CPU usage is -1%. Surely that's not normal??

[Paul Adams]

RMAs often get returned/rejected if the reseller is unable to verify the fault, so the first thing I would do is wait and see if you get any further bugchecks, and then look if there is a pattern.
Was the system prebuilt or did you set it up from components?

Heat can cause erratic errors with unpredictable symptoms, for example - that's not always something a stress test can force either (if it's the system temperature triggering the problem rather than the CPU core temperature through workload alone).

I have no idea how HDTune works out its average CPU usage - it might not be taking into account SpeedStep or multiple cores, maybe?

[watercooled]

I built the system myself - everything was bought from Scan apart from the Case/PSU which was bought from CCL because Scan didn't have any in stock. It happened when I was just browsing the web in Firefox and I think I opened a new tab and that's when it blue screened. CPU temperatures look fine, the heatsink barely feels warm but the northbridge heatsink does get hot - almost too hot too touch, temps are reported around 55C by the BIOS (idle) and 50C according to HWMonitor. I don't have a thermometer handy to check temps myself but if it's worth doing I can borrow one. It might also be worth noting that, although voltages are fine according to BIOS, HWMonitor reports the +5V rail as 5.56V (just out of spec). I'll try to dig out my multimeter to check that.
Thanks for your help BTW.

Edit: You think I should ask on the Scan forums to see what they think I should do in regards to getting an RMA? A BSOD wouldn't have bothered me if the system was a fair bit older but like I said this PC is days old.

[Paul Adams]

No worries, I hate problems with new system builds - there are so many variables :/

I had to RMA 1 stick of DDR3 RAM out of 12 from 2 complete (luckily identical, for testing purposes) systems I bought a couple of months ago (the BIOS reported only 10GB present with 6x2GB sticks, on both systems).
After the first RMA they returned it saying no fault was found, so I had to get on the phone when I repro'd the problem again shortly after reinstalling the memory.

(Luckily the purchasing history I have with this company let them scratch it and send me new memory, which works flawlessly.)

Certainly doesn't hurt to ask regarding the RMA process, but I'd assume they would want a reliable repro on a non-beta OS for them to even contemplate it.

I doubt very much that what you were doing was directly the cause of the bugcheck - user mode activity cannot cause an exception in kernel mode, so at best it's a driver issue, and at worst an intermittent hardware glitch.

[watercooled]

I'll ask on the Scan forums to see what they say. I'm hoping it's just something to do with Win 7 rather than a hardware issue - at least that will stop when the full version in released. I'm running memtest now since it can't hurt I suppose, 0 errors so far.

[rabbid]

you could run a cpu test, prime95 or orthos maybe under windows, to stress the cpu more (as its your suspected culprit) and see if you get errors.

[watercooled]

I did try running a few different benchmarks, including wprime and superpi and 7zip benchmark but I've not tried prime95/orthos yet although I did try OCCT but it crashed on on loading screen - this also happened with CPU-Z and HWMonitor, and I think OCCT uses these itself. It must be an incompatibility with Win7. I'll try a stress test later...
Thanks

[rabbid]

yes, have you tried xp or vista on another partition or disk as well, as most diag tools will be designed for these currently.
It may indicate whether the possible fault is cpu or OS related?
If you can create a replicable fault on either of those then you have more solid grounds for RMA.

[watercooled]

TBH I haven't managed to reproduce the fault even on Win 7 - maybe it was cosmic rays caused it? Anyway, it might have just been a one-off.
And no, I don't have another Windows OS to play with - everything I have is licensed to other PCs.

[watercooled]

I'm running memtest now - no errors so far. BTW, according to memtest my memory is running at 433MHz rather than 400 but according to CPU-Z it's at 371.5 under load. Is this just another case of incorrect software reading?

[Salazaar]

I've one BSOD since starting to use windows 7, I wouldn't worry about it if you can't reproduce the problem. Sometime these thing just happen purely at random, and I certainly wouldn't see it as a sign that anything is wrong if you have no further problems.

[watercooled]

That's reassuring, thanks