Recently I have built a 3D rendering station for a client of mine. The machine runs, but crashes about once or twice a day with a BSOD (watchdog violation 1x133. Blue Screen View mentions either nvlddmkm.sys or ntoskrnl.exe as culprit.
Things I have tried so far:
- Clean install Windows 10
- Clean install Windows 7
- DDU removal of graphics drivers
- latest nVidia drivers
- older nVidia drivers
- extensive RAM testing
Specs:
- Asus X99-WS 10G E
- Intel 6850K
- 7x Zotac 1080ti Blower Edition (transformed to water cooling)
- 64GB RAM
- Samsung 960 Pro 512GB (system drive)
- 3x WD Red in RAID 0 (data drive)
- 2x Cooler Master V1200 PSU
- Custom EK watercooling loop
- Obsidian 900D
Speccy Snapshot: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/qchWoHD0m7mueWTEVccxFlD
Any help or insight on this issue would be greatly appreciated, as this issue now causes great delays in my client's workflow.
I narrowed down the issue to the NVIDIA drivers for Windows 10. It affects specifically the high-end Workstation Motherboards that feature PLX PEX 8747 PCI-E switches from Broadcom, with three or more GTX Pascal GPU cards.
Whether this is by accident or intentional by NVIDIA I don't know, but I'm very frustrated they've known it and haven't acted for several months. The drivers are broken since last July/August, for 9 months already.
An old but stable driver is version 382.53 (supports up to CUDA 8.0), from June / July 2017. You can download it directly from NVIDIA. The issue was first introduced in the newer drivers that followed.
Following lots of pressure, NVIDIA's Tech Support have confirmed they're looking into this and they recently added the issue in the Known Issues section, in the Release Notes of the recently released drivers (May).
So, I hope this information is helpful to everyone with the aforementioned computer configuration. Use driver 382.53 as a workaround and report your problem to NVIDIA's Tech Support, mentioning the model of your WS motherboard and why you need NVIDIA to address this issue in its latest drivers.