Please Help - FFXIV causing complete system crash.

[Melichoir]

Ill try to be as thorough as possible, so please bear with me. After 12 hours of troubleshooting, Im out of ideas at this point and any solid advice would be greatly appreciated. Im posting this across a few boards across the internet to see if anyone out there has any ideas. If youd like to know my system hardware stats, please scroll to the bottom where Ive left a link to it


Ive recently Purchased FFXIV off of steam to play with friends. The game seems to run fine, but will randomly cause a complete system crash. The crashes causes are not always consistent, meaning they appear to not be linked to a particular area/action/visual. The most common crash type however is as follows.

Screen will abruptly turn black, sound will stutter infinitely, All chasis fans may ramp up to maximium (About 50% of the time this occurs, other time it does not). This requires a force shut down and restart. Computer will start up normally following the restart.

The program will perform crashes in bouts it seems. Where it will run for a few hours (4-5) then continuously crash after getting logged into the game. Even at character selection it may happen.

This issue is specific to FFXIV. No other game I play has any issues, and on my current set up I can run every other game at maximum settings with no problems.

Things I have tried/investigated into.
-I have downloaded programs (I believe the one I got was recommended from this site) to monitor computer stats, such as cpu/gpu heat and etc. I do not believe it to be an over heat issue at this time, as one of the crashes happens when CPU and GPU temps are still within reason (50-70Celsius range) when the game is running. All fans are running as well.

-Updating my video drivers did not fix the issue. Though there are issues with my video drivers that I am aware of (Nvidea for some reason has a difficult time updating my driver when I download and use the installer). This is a possible problem but Im personally not to sure simply because if it was the video driver, I feel I should be experiencing issues across multiple games.

-Ive run the Benchmark test provided by Square-Enix. The score the benchmark sends back is 10k in the character part.

-Ive tried adjusting all the settings from max to minimum to see if that effects the outcome. At some point in time the game will still crash.

-I have run the Steam cache verification to check for corrupted files. While Steam had found unvalidated files, after steam redownloaded and replaced those files, the crashes still continue. Steam seems to not carry the full date version, so it will always apparently find 44 unvalidated files?

-Ive run Antiviral software for any potential issues. I have also cleaned out harddrive space, and checked for any surface issue problems with the hardware through device manager.

-Ive run the game in various windowed modes to see if that causes it, this does not seem to be the case.

-I have uninstalled and reinstalled the game. The crashes still occur in the same manner.

Potential Issues that may or may not be related
- The CPU may be capping out. During one of the times when I was trying to trouble shoot this by seeing if it was a heat issue or not, I notice my CPU usage gets up to 85% total. Im not sure if this is normal or considerably high.

- Alt tabbing while windowed might be a possible cause, though crashes have occured when Ive alt tabbed, and when I wasnt running with anything in the background.

- I run vent in the background, and dont know if this may be a possible cause.

-As mentioned, the video driver has weird issues about updating, telling me it fails to update, but showing the updated version when I check. The things that may be failing to update are the PhysX system Software, The Maya Plugin, and the GeForce Experience. The other parts seem to show it as being to date.

At this point in time, if I want to continue playing the game, the only solutions Im left with is going back and assuming this is some kind of overheat/overload problem, and replacing my CPU, adding in liquid cooling, and possibly upgrading the PSU. These are things I planned on doing in tme anyways, but at this point in time, I may push it forward. However, I really dont want to have to resort to that, and not know if that will solve the issue.

So please, if anyone has anything on this, please share.
Thanks again.

System Specs From FFXIV Client

[worldofneil]

Overheating is the obvious one, but since you've been checking that, possibly not.

How big is your power supply and what sort of brand/quality is it? I only ask because perhaps it's related to that and the graphics card needing more power to do something quick and the PSU isn't handling it very well.

I was actually having this problem recently myself in that occasionally I would get random lock ups and something even reboots multiple times in a day and I eventually worked out it was my 5+ year old power supply. Even though it was a good brand and 1200W of capacity (about 800W more than I actually needed!) it had basically gone bad over time. I replaced it with a new one and since then haven't had a single crash/reboot. I appreciate that's not an easy thing to check though as who has a spare PSU? But if you have monitoring software that logs the voltages to disk you could see what they were before it crashed (maybe if it saved in time). Sorry I don't know any software off top of my head that could do that, but I'm sure there are some).

Before you do any of that though, might be worth just checking your RAM isn't actually faulty (although I'd expect that to more crash the game than the whole computer, but anything is possible!). I'd recommend either using Memtest86 or Memtest86+ (there is a difference believe it or not). Personally I use Memtest86+ and you basically either burn it to a CD or use the USB installer to put it on a blank USB drive and then boot from either and it'll just run. By default it'll just start an automatic test so you don't need to select anything. Although you should let it run for entire duration (may take a while), in my experience, usually bad RAM comes up with errors fairly quickly so it'll be pretty obvious pretty soon if it's RAM related.

I have run the Steam cache verification to check for corrupted files. While Steam had found unvalidated files, after steam redownloaded and replaced those files, the crashes still continue. Steam seems to not carry the full date version, so it will always apparently find 44 unvalidated files?

That's because Steam has a copy of the game (from around 2.1 I believe), it doesn't update via Steam so when you verify files it actually rolls your client back to 2.1 (or whenever the Steam version is) and then the client itself will update those files back to 2.5 (big downloads!). So basically you can't use that feature of Steam because it won't work for any game that updates itself outside of Steam as it will always find invalid files as anything newer/downloaded in the game won't match what it thinks that game should have so it'll try and redownload them - Hope that makes sense?

Hope this is of some help!