UDK Editor freeze/crash/locks up computer when move mouse over viewport [Solved]

[twinsen]

Solution: Update motherboard BIOS which had a fix for gtx680 and pci express 3

I hadn't been able to use UDK Editor since I installed it, and I thought it might have been my graphics card (gtx680).
The UDK log said nothing suspicious (eg no render thread crash), the crashes were middle of a typical info line.
The procedure was always the same it would work fine as long as I kept the mouse away from the viewport (eg content browser was fine, toolbar and menus were fine).

I looked at the windows event log and it mentioned Kernel-Power critical error reboot without shutdown.
Searching with that error led me to find a solution to the problem.

Disable CPU turbo mode in BIOS, then it worked.

It turns out the CPU was likely entering turbo mode when moving the mouse over the UDK editor viewport!

I tried many other things first, like installing new drivers, changing nvidia driver settings, disabling the 2nd sound driver. I also found the afterimagestudios UDK demo would crash, and Far Cry 3 (so it wasn't limited to just UDK).

See also
http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-d...al-errors.html
which has lots of other possible things to try.

I thought I'd post even though I solved it, so perhaps others can find solutions to UDK lockups.

[twinsen]

Unfortunately the crashes came back. They are just much less frequent and harder to reproduce.
It happens after hours of using UDK Editor now. For example the last time it happened I was trying to align two static meshes in the viewport (and lost some work).
If I turn "turbo mode" in the bios back on (the setting the computer came with), then it goes back to crashing when you move the mouse to the viewport on startup every time.

Any tips on what to try next?
I was hoping to find something that crashes as easy as UDK so I can take my computer back and reproduce the problem so they can fix it. If its just UDK, they could say that its a software fault in UDK.
I've tried to run IntelBurnTest, OCCT and Prime95 to stress test the cpu, unfortunately no full computer lock ups yet.
Anyone know of any non UDK game demos that are cpu and gpu intensive?

[twinsen]

Crysis demo causes a lockup eventually.
At the moment I suspect its the power supply, since it happens when pushing both the GPU and CPU and not the CPU alone, and turning off turbo mode would reduce the CPU power usage and delay the lockup.

[twinsen]

Solved!

I reimaged my PC and took it back to PLE and they tested it. They found that only 1 NVIDIA card wouldn't freeze UDK and they don't sell that card anymore. But the radeon cards were fine, so I bought a 7950 card and it doesn't freeze. They said it was a motherboard incompatibility with NVIDIA cards. I read about others with similar problems and found that forcing the BIOS to pcie 1x for all slots fixed it for the NVIDIA card. But at gen1 speeds the heaven benchmark for the gtx680 was half the 7950. I looked up my motherboard (sabertooth x79) drivers and they have a fix for the gtx680. Apparently no PCIe 3.0 GPU was available when the motherboard was released [1], so I guess its not surprising that there is a compatibility issue with cards that were not even released. I'm glad they released BIOS updates to fix the problems [2].
[1] http://www.overclock.net/t/1233341/v...for-gtx-680/20
[2] http://support.asus.com/download.asp...SABERTOOTH+X79

So if anyone else has freezing UDK issues
* Update graphics card drivers.
* See if motherboard has fixes for PCI Express or graphics cards and update accordingly. You might ask someone to update the BIOS for you as it might be tricky.