Kernel times CPU percentage 100%!!!! Game crashes! What makes Kernel peek?

[Arin 0]

I've been having this random problem in counterstrike source and day of defeat source where the game will suddenly crash causing the sound to loop and loop forever. I have to CTRL+Alt+Del to turn off the game.

 

I have two monitors and decided to monitor the task manager to see if one of my processes started going nuts right before the crash. I noticed nothing, so I then monitored my cpu usage.

 

The game typically runs at about 100% cpu usage, however when the game crashes the red kernel times bar peeks and holds at 100% usage! What could be causing the kernel times to peek like that and hold?

 

 

There is a lengthy thread over here where everyone gives suggestions on how to fix the problem:

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/sh...mp;pagenumber=1

 

Mainly their suggestions are doing things that shouldn't be done like turning off several features in the game. All of which don't really work. The game still randomly crashes. I can play forever, or sometimes only for 5 minutes.

 

I've gone as far as to swap video card from nvidia to ati, and sound cards from sblive to sb audigy 2 zx. I've done a million of the other suggestions, but it still does it.

 

What is troubling me is that kernel time peek and since I am one of the rare people that have two monitors, I think I may be the only one who has figured this out. Anyone have a clue what causes those times to peek? that may lend a hand into figuring out what is causing this problem.

[jmmijo 1]

I've noticed something similar, however, in different games such as Guild Wars, Lineage II and Dungeon Siege 2. It always occurs during some kind of graphics action(s) on my screen at the time and of course I have to hit the reset button to reboot my box.

 

I've narrowed the cause down to my graphics card, an X800 Pro, and I think it has some flaky frame buffer memory chip(s) as some of the graphics diags seem to indicate this as being the cause of random failures.

 

Since I'm getting parts to build my new SLI rig, I'll post more info once I get it built and tested out with the same games of course

[Arin 0]

I dont think anything graphicly intense is happening because there have been times when it happened while I was in a dark hall with not much going on.

[jmmijo 1]

You're probably correct on this, however, you describe the symptons that I'm having to a "T". This doesn't mean however, that these same symptons can not occur with other issues as well