Windows 10 Build 9879: NVIDIA Driver Issues on Intel X79/X99 Platforms

On Wednesday of this week Microsoft provided another Windows 10 Technical Preview Build to the Windows Insider program via the “Fast” channel.

As am I currently testing these preview builds as my sole OS on my daily machines (I like to dogfood) I went ahead and installed the new build , the first machine being my custom Intel Haswell-E workstation on the X99 chipset, and the 2nd a 128GB Surface Pro 2.

Everything seemed to go well on the Surface Pro 2, however my Haswell-E workstation was a different story…

The upgrade completed all the way through to around 94% of configuring devices then abruptly blue screened the machine with a 0x124 bugcheck error., an error one would normally see as the result of an unstable CPU overclock for example as this can generally indicates a hardware/driver error.

Now I knew for a fact that my CPU overclock wasn’t unstable as it was initially put through 24 hour runs on various tools including real world usage scenarios, so thinking it was an upgrade glitch I opted for a clean install.

With the clean install done I proceeded to install all my drivers, until I went to install drivers for my NVIDIA GTX 980 video card. Upon installing the latest 344.65 drivers the machine blue screened again with the same 0x124 bugcheck, not looking great…

Thinking it may just be an issue with the particular driver version I tried everything from the previous releases, manual install via device manager, safe mode installation to compatibility mode but this still resulted in exactly the same behaviour.

Friend and fellow blogger Chris123NT had spoken to me regarding this exact same issue on his X99 system running SLI GTX 780Ti’s and also mentioned of others experiencing it on the previous X79 platform.

So what’s going on with Build 9879 on these hardware configurations? That’s a good question and one that is yet to be answered by the Windows team, but from a first glance it’s looking as though 9879 has some updated code in the Kernel which is having a knock-on affect with NVIDIA cards running on the Intel X79/X99 Platforms.

After some testing here is what I’ve found:

  • This issue appears to be present on Intel X79/X99 platforms with NVIDIA video cards
  • Other platforms such as Z97 and Haswell Mobile seem to be unaffected – Only Z97 and Haswell Mobile tested so far by myself
  • X99 with AMD video cards are unaffected – Tested with an HD 5870

 

Over the course of this weekend I will try my best to test on other platforms such as X58 and older GTX 600 series cards. I have also raised this issue to Microsoft so if hear anything back from the Windows team I will update this post.

Update: After asking Microsoft for an update on this issue they have mentioned to me that they have been able to re-produce the bug internally but no word if or when a fix will be available (not looking likely)

I can again confirm that AMD video cards are unaffected as Chris123NT has successfully tested this with an R9 270 GPU.

Those who are on the Haswell platform with Devils Canyon CPUs and NVIDIA GPUs are also unaffected, therefore this is looking like a Kernel bug at Microsoft’s end with X79/X99 configurations.

2 Replies to “Windows 10 Build 9879: NVIDIA Driver Issues on Intel X79/X99 Platforms”

  1. I have installed x99 with i7 5960x and graphics amd r9 290 and have the same problem as you, and not only with build 9879 but also with the build 9901. Greetings.

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