I have been working with Cubase 8 for a little while now without problems. Certainly not any BSODs. For some reason after a week or so of not using cubase I get BSOD when loading a composition. Normally I would think this as being a hardware issue so I have tested things out. I detached my fireface 400 and the BSOD seemed to stop. I then attached it again whilst cubase 8 was open and it didn’t BSOD.
I tested out different VST’s that I commonly use. I found that when I opened kontakt 5 it have a BSOD.
I reinstalled the latest update for kontakt 5 and then tested it again. It seemed to go away but then it just have a BSOD again after a short while.
I still have cubase 7.5 installed and so I fired that up and loaded the same track into 7.5. This worked without any BSOD and I didn’t have anything happen within the 3 hours I was working with it.
I’m really not sure what is going on but it can’t be hardware. I have not installed anything new within the last month.
Strange thing was that I had the latest version of 7.5 installed (7.5.4) but it was showing 7.5.0. Very odd. I had to reinstall the update 7.5.4 again. Not sure why the update didn’t show up. I installed it soon after it came out.
Bios shows everything as it should be…all voltages, frequencies are correct. I do not overclock.
Does the BSODs display any information regarding the crashes? BSODs are usually because of bad/misbehaving drivers (if not broken hardware, like bad RAM). Applications like Cubase and Kontakt runs in user-mode and shouldn’t be able to crash the whole OS. Drivers, running at the same privilege level as the OS, can easily do that.
Are your troubles related to the amount of RAM your sessions are using? If so, try testing your RAM.
Well. I’ve got an update. I did two things and one of them has stopped the BSOD’s. I’ve disconnected the DVD rom as I noticed that one of the BSOD’s had cdrom.sys involved.
As I said I also updated 7.5.0 to 7.5.4 so I’m not sure if this helped. I’m guessing it is probably the DVD drive causing problems. I’m not sure why it would suddenly start doing that though.
Is it a Asus Motherboard? If so, they really hate 4770Ks. Their “optimized defaults” seems to always under-volt the 4770Ks. That instability when under a load (Cubase) could be the cause of the BSOD.
It’s definately a hardware thing.
I don’t think it’s related to the cdrom.sys (even though it showed in the crash), it’s probably a side-effect / victim of CPU clock instability. If the BSODs come back, we’ll have our answer (I hope for your sake, they don’t).
Did you set a manual voltage in the UEFI or BIOS? If so, what?
Also, be sure to update the BIOS (or UEFI) to latest version and motherboard chipset drivers.
It took me a long time to dial in the winning voltage for my 4770K. And I had to underclock it even with water cooling. I eventually moved it into a work server and upgraded my DAW to the 4790K which can run hot like a champ and stay rock stable.
The new Devil’s Canyon generation of processors are way more DAW-friendly than the 4770s. Especially with ASUS motherboards.