Collecting data re NMI Parity Error / Hard Lock with t60p + v5200

I have been having reproducable hard locks while playing World of Warcraft.
(and bf2142.. though not as reproducable)

From reading around the forums it seems other people are having similar problems.

I thought I'd start this post so we can collect data about this problem, and
hopefully get it escilated through ibm/lenovo tech support, or ATI's tech support so it actually gets dealt with.
I've been unable to contact a tech support person who knows anything solid about this problem.

While I know this is a CAD machine, I find it unacceptable that a bug causes hard crashes
reproducably during heavy 3d load, on a $5k (in my case) laptop, and the issue has been left unsolved.

Details:

I have a t60p, 2007-94U. 2.16ghz, 2x 1gb ibm shipped memory. v5200.
The only notable system change between the stock 2007-94U is
that I swapped out the intel 802.11 card for an ibm atheros one.

I'm running Windows XP Pro SP2, Everything patched and current, current bios, current thinkpad drivers for everything and so on.

I have tried various versions of the drivers for the v5200, all which have had the same result.
1: IBM's official drivers
2: Omega drivers
3: Catalyst Mobility 6.9, hacked INF to force load
4: Catalyst non-mobility 6.9, hacked INF to force load
5: ATI's Firegl drivers

The problem exists for all of them as best as I can tell.

All diagnostics have come up with no problems, memtest86 shows no problems, I have noticed no instability
along these lines in any other case then under high 3d load.


I generally run the machine in an advanced mini-dock, with a dell 24" on DVI as the primary monitor
and the laptop display as the secondary.

Resolutions are 1920x1200x32, 1600x1200x32.

I can reproduce the crash by logging into WoW somewhere busy (like orgrimmar)
and waiting. It generally happens anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes after login.

Almost all the time there is slight, thin white horizontal static across BOTH the monitors before a crash.
The static is very thin and slight, maybe 2 or 3 discernable rows, and it looks like its 'chasing'
up the screen sometimes, like an old tv's vhold being off.

I have noticed a few failure modes:

1: What appears to be a VPU reset. This is the most rare. Screen will blank out, come back, WoW will continue to run.
2: Screen blanks, or image freezes on screen, and sound loops. this requires holding down the power button to restart the machine. Windows seems unaware that a crash occoured (no warnings, etc on next reboot) (this is the most common)
3: Blue NMI: Parity Error screen

At first I thought that this was the fault of the docking station, since it seems to happen less often if the machine is
not docked. Eventually I was able to reproduce the same problem while not in a docking station. Also able to reproduce it
driving a monitor via the VGA port, not docked, or with just the laptop screen alone, in mirrored or external monitor only
configurations as well.

Using tpfancontrol, the GPU temperture is reported at a peak of around 108C, idle of around 75-80C.
I'm fairly certain that tpfancontrol incorrectly reports this temperture, either in that its not celcius, or that it may
be being reported in half-degree-celcius units or something, because i'm fairly certain that 108C is far outside of the
thermal limits of the v5200. I also am ruling out thermal issues due to the specific pre-warning symptoms
at crash, which differ from general overheating failures.

I have removed and reseated the heatsink to no effect. Thermal pads for the chipset and GPU are intact. Everyone should note
that you CANNOT replace the thermal pads with thermal grease, the gap between the GPU and heatsink is designed to be filled
with the thermal pad. Thermal grease properly applied to the GPU will NOT COME IN CONTACT with the heatsink. This may be
part/build specific, but I'm pretty sure this is across the board for all t60p's.

The problem DOES NOT seem to occour if i remove one of my 1gb sticks. I have tried various ordering of the sticks, replaced
one with a replcement from ibm, to no avail. So far the only thing that consistantly works is removing one stick.

A friend is coming over with a pile of compatable memory today, and I'm going to try various configurations to try and
solidify a few theories.

1) 1gb + 512mb (attempt to force the memory out of dual-channel mode)
2) 512mb + 512mb (see if its reproducable in dual-channel mode with <2gb)
3) 1gb + 1gb (of friends memory, to doublecheck its not a general memory problem)

I want to try and test 1gb + 2gb, however 2gb sticks are out of my reach currently.

The theory I'm leaning towards is that there is an incompatability with ATI's hypermemory implementation and the ICH7m chipset
running in dual channel mode. Unfortunately there is no way to disable hypermemory (verified with someone fimiliar with ati
hardware) to directly test this, so I'm trying to alter system memory paramaters to find a stable situation.

If I can narrow this down to a dual-channel specific problem, I may try and talk IBM into sending me a single
2GB sodimm, to replace my current memory. While I have no idea if they'll bite on that, It seems like it would be the
most direct solution if my theory is correct. I think that after the time and energy I've put into solving what seems
to be their problem, time on the phone with their techs, as well as the generally high cost of the machine that there should
be some way that I can meet my desired specs, without it reproducably failing.

So I'd like to get information from anyone else who is having similar problems, and details of their configurations, and any
observations that match or contradict mine on this issue. Especially useful would be any methods besides WoW to reliably
reproduce this problem.

If people have ibm case numbers regarding this situation, we may be able to round up enough of them to convince ibm/lenovo
that there really is an issue besides 'bad memory' or other arbitrary problems.

Thanks very much for (hopefully) reading my tl;dr post, I hope that we can find some kind of solution to this problem.

If anyone would perferr to discuss this personally, feel free to pm me.

thanks for all the work. i don't have a v5200, but i too experience the lockups you mentioned when running 3d games. the last episode happened when i tried out the demo/benchmark for FFXi.

while the video cards are different, the similarity i noticed between your situation and mine is that the problem doesn't happen when i take out my second stick of ram. my computer came with 512, and i added another 1GB later on. when i take out the 1GB, i don't get the lockups.

Results of my memory tests:

2x matched 512mb pc4200:

Worked fine.

1x 512mb pc4200, 1x IBM 1gb:

Works fine, both chips clocked down to pc4200 speed

2x 1gb valueselect pc5300 (from friends dell):

Crashes in wow. also got an IRQ_LESS_THEN (or whatever) from this configuration, in addition to the parity error.
Interestingly the memory clocks the same in his dell, and works fine.

So I think this verifies that its not a matter of being dualchannel.

It does raise the question of why the same pc5300 memory works in a dell (1505 i think, same chipset?) but not in the thinkpad.

It also raises the posibility that the instability could be caused by the t60p not actually being able to handle clocking pc5300 during heavy load. This
could also just be a general manufacturing issue.

I'm not sure where to go with this next, I may try talking to ibm tech support and see if I can get the mainboard, or the entire system replaced.

On a side note, has anyone been able to read SPD info for any of their
ibm chips? I've been trying cpu-z, which seems unable to gather spd data.

Heya, there's a couple of other similar threads here:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=33422
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=33457

I've got a T60p with similar problems - but 100% correlates with being on battery power. I've got 2GB pc5300 ram, but it had the same problem with the IBM 512MB that came with it.

I've tried the new bios to no avail

Hope there's a solution for this...

my lockups went away after updating to the latest video drivers.

Thanks

i also have the EXACT SAME T60p as the OP has, including the intel/atheros swap..

i experienced BSOD's using 2gig on SOME additional memory parts..
currently using two of the same maker with no problem..

the point is could this hard lockup be caused by system memory..
the T60p seems to be very critical of the additional upgrade memory parts..
i.e. some work, some do not..

Both memory modules are identical. It was not an upgrade done by me.

The memory sticks are SimpleTECH 2x1GB

I have this problem with my T60 while watching videos on metacafe.com i get BSOD

*** Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error
*** The system has halted ***

I sent it back to Lenovo they replaced the ram hard drive motherboard graphic card etc...
And they sent me back the machine few days later I got the BSOD again! I sent it back to Lenovo and they gave me a new machine
Few days later I got the BSOD again!!! While watching videos on youtube.com
I think its something to do with ATI graphic card have a look at this link http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=92036
I posted there too about my problem.

My dad has a T43 that had this problem: solution, after the shop replaced motherboard, etc. they reinstalled OS and immediately the RAM showed up as faulty. I see you are going to try the RAM today anyway... good luck, I hope that is the problem.

Thanks

Did you have the motherboard and/or graphics card replaced?

Hi to all,

After a lot of tests I ran the PC Doctor from DOS, the one that can be run using Recovery Console. During all the test of memory and system everything was fine exept the display.

I ran the display test and the video adapter failed on memory. It just said fail. In the screen there are a lot of lines and for the moment I can load windows only by disabling the display adapter. If I enable it I'll get NMI: Parity Error BSOD.

Any idea ?
Anyone had the same experience ?
Is this a bad motherboard ?
Has it to do with hypermemory ?
Bad memory ?

Thanks,
Miri

Hi guys...has anyone experienced a situation like mine (see the post above) ?

Regards,
Miri

To follow up:

I had lenovo replace the motherboard.

This seemed to more or less solve the problem,
and somehow upgraded me to a v5250 in the process.

The tech swapped the old ram, and the old cpu into the new motherboard,
and things seem fine.

I dont know what exacty to blame this one, I'm leaning towards motherboard memory trace layout problems, but thats pretty hard to prove.

I've had my T60P for three weeks now, and for the last two of those the parity error has been plaguing the machine.

When the error first occurred I called IBM support and they sent me 2 new 1GB memory units to replace the ones in the machine. That didn't help.

I called again (on a Thursday night) and on Monday morning a tech came on-site and replaced the system board. He was unable to run the built-in diagnostic memory test but we started a run of Memtest86 and it seemed to be doing fine. I ran memtest for six cycles and no errors were reported. But when I rebooted XP, there was an NMI Parity error within 1/2 hour.

I called IBM and they asked me to ship the machine to them for full depot maintenance. The machine went out on a Wedesday (1 week ago today). The machine was returned on Monday. The only indicated repair was a new bios. The tech indicated that the machine was tested with a separate hard drive. I had indicated that re-imaging was not to be done, but I had given them all of my passwords, so I don't know why a new drive was required.

Within five minutes of restarting the system there was a BSOD with the NMI Parity error. Needless to say, I was more than a little steamed. I called IBM and asked to return the T60P for a refund. They connected me with Lenovo. The sales Rep offered to give me a replacement machine, but cited a one to two week ship date. I told him that I had ordered this machine in November and it did not ship until two months later. This was after having the ship date update every two weeks to indicate that the new ship date was two weeks out. I said that I didn't trust Lenovo's two week estimates. He said he would have to get approval for me to return the machine.

In the interim I did a Google search and found this thread. Since it seemed to indicate that the video drivers might be at fault, I searched for newer video drivers. I found the 8.323 driver which was one version past my current driver. I loaded this driver and the machine ran for over 24 hours without a parity error.

Now, the absence of a problem does not indicate the presence of a fix. I had backed the hard drive up before sending the T60P in for depot repair. So I backed up the T60P with the new driver and restored the old drive image, with the prior video driver. After I rebooted, the machine got a parity error within 1/2 hour. The machine was doing "nothing". There were no foreground programs running. But, of course, no machine is truly doing nothing unless it is hibernating or turned off.

I restored the image with driver 8.323 and again the machine is staying up with no parity errors. About 16 hours now.

I will leave the machine running for a few days (fingers crossed!) and report back on my status. I hope this helps some folks.

Addendum:
I'm still waiting to hear from Lenovo on the return authorization. If this problem is fixed, I would keep the machine. But I do not feel well served by support. As I told the sales rep who offered me a replacement: this is the worst experience I have had with a Thinkpad since I bought the first one in 1992. Everything about this has soured me: the ordering, the two month wait, the inability to fix a problem. I ordered the machine in November and only now may have a working machine two-and-a-half months later.

doeca-t, thanks for sharing your research into the cause of this problem. I've been having the same issue with my v5250.

I've tried all available video drivers, as well as different sodimms, with no alleviation of the lockups. I almost always get:

The T60P was running fine for a few days, so I assumed that the video driver was the problem and the new driver had fixed the problem.

Last night I replaced ZoneAlarm with the Comodo firewall. Comodo indicated that it was turning on DEP (but I think it was already on). Within a half hour I got the parity error.

I uninstalled Comodo and re-installed ZA and left the machine on overnight. This morning there was a parity error BSOD.

I am backing the machine up and will restore to the last good backup to see if the machine stays up. But I am beginning to feel that this is not fixable with drivers.

I still have not heard from Lenovo about a return authorization.

Get a replacment, this seems to be a case of faulty hardware, either mobo, bios or incompatible on board devices.

I called Lenovo today about the return, after posting my prior message. They had authorized a return for refund on Tuesday, then cancelled that on Wednesday, instead opting to send a replacement.

In neither case did they contact me. This whole process of dealing with Lenovo has completely soured me on them.

1) I ordered the machine in November, four months in advance of my needing the machine for travelling. After several slips of delivery date, the machine came two months later. Order=24 November, delivery=23 January.
2) Within a week I got the parity error. Three weeks later, after new memory, a new system board and depot repair, I still have a relative boat anchor. As to a new Mobo: part of the service was to replace the system board, but the problem remained unfixed.
3) Others above have noted that they received new machines and still had the problem.
4) I am now 1 month short of needing the machine for travelling, and given Lenovo's track record on delivery, I am probably looking at a minimum of two weeks to get the new machine. I can't work with that time frame.

Sorry to rant, but I have no confidence in this box at all. Since Lenovo say they won't take it back, I'm going the credit-card hold route with this.

Driver update for the wireless card explicitly states it should fix the NMI Parity Error:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR-62875

I had error #2 (no bluescreens, only the lockups) with 1x1gb of lenovo installed ram (which passes memtest). I switched from the lenovo video drivers to ati's firegl drivers ver 8.342 and so far have no had any issues. I will update if anything else occurs

Since I got my T60p in January I have had this BSOD twice:

I also ran MEMTEST86 with no problems reported. Thanks to Zender for posting the information about the wireless driver update - I will try this and report back only if I get the BSOD again, since it is a rare occurrence for me.

guys, any updates on this? any resolutions?

I haven't had any BSOD since updating the wireless driver (fingers crossed!)

I just had a T60 in today with that error. I reproduced it with either and both sticks of RAM. I opted to order a motherboard. If I remember, I'll let you know if it fixed the problem.

The way I produced the error was booting to the UBCD. Launching to windows from the CD... and then telling it to "shutdown and eject CD". It produced the error after ejecting the CD... every time.

Oh yeah... Memtest86 did not report any errors either. I doubt it's RAM related.

What is the UBCD?

Oh... sorry.

Ultimate Boot CD.

Google UBCD. I believe that it's a free download, but I've never actually had to download it, since we have tons of copies floating around the store.

Did you try the wireless driver update to see if that fixed the problem?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-62875

No... I'll give that a shot if the motherboard doesn't fix it (since I'm not at work, and the part will probably be there when I get in Monday).

Thanks for the link.