Persistent Crash to Desktop - bug or hardware issue?

I've been loving the game, but struggling with stability issues. Generally, my game will CTD every ~5-20 minutes, which is annoying but manageable since PoE2 seems to have a robust checkpointing system. Troubleshooting has turned up a few possibilities, including the possibility I cannot exclude - that my rather new RAM has a hardware fault.

I've taken several steps to address this including uninstalling GPU drivers with DDU & reinstalling, ensuring other drivers are up-to-date, and running SFC, CHKDSK, etc. - I think I've done my due diligence aside from memtest86/windows memory diagnostic, which I plan to do soon.


I've had 3 bluescreens with the following errors:

page fault in nonpaged area
driver_irql_not_less_or_equal
attempted write to readonly memory

Never had any issues with other programs, including some RAM-intensive genAI usage.

Looking into the far more common CTDs in Event Viewer reveals the following:

Faulting application name: PathOfExileSteam.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x675535c0
Faulting module name: PathOfExileSteam.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x675535c0
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000eb02ba
Faulting process id: 0xc94
Faulting application start time: 0x01db4957f5f8889d
Faulting application path: D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Path of Exile 2\PathOfExileSteam.exe
Faulting module path: D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Path of Exile 2\PathOfExileSteam.exe
Report Id: 872575e7-9758-4854-981b-c64ffb807b58
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:


Faulting application name: PathOfExileSteam.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x675535c0
Faulting module name: PathOfExileSteam.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x675535c0
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000db88b2
Faulting process id: 0x3dd4
Faulting application start time: 0x01db494e30cc39b3
Faulting application path: D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Path of Exile 2\PathOfExileSteam.exe
Faulting module path: D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Path of Exile 2\PathOfExileSteam.exe
Report Id: d4e69039-5cfe-4fb8-8f27-b963c664b44e
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

Faulting application name: PathOfExileSteam.exe, version: 0.0.0.0, time stamp: 0x675535c0
Faulting module name: ntdll.dll, version: 10.0.19041.5007, time stamp: 0x688f8c4b
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000025bb6
Faulting process id: 0x364c
Faulting application start time: 0x01db494c44c1fc64
Faulting application path: D:\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Path of Exile 2\PathOfExileSteam.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\ntdll.dll
Report Id: d9adebba-af58-44ac-b988-a351f611d9fe
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:

I'll keep troubleshooting on my end, consider this a bug report, but if anything else of interest turns up I'll post it here.

edit: this is not associated with excessive temperatures and persists across a variety of graphics settings. Most of the time the GPU spikes to 100% utilization around the time this happens, but it seems equally likely to be cause or consequence.

An update, several days late: I solved the issue! It was indeed a RAM issue, it appears. I changed my OC profile from "Auto" to "XMP Profile I" in UEFI, and this appears to have cleared the issue up. Hope this helps!