Driver crashing very often

freemini · April 12, 2014

About a month ago, my driver crashed while playing Dota 2 so I just restarted and ignored it. Fast forward a few weeks and the frequency of these crashes has significantly increased, today I crashed at least 5 times per game. I decided to get prime95 and furmark along with stuff like speedfan and afterburner to try and debug this thing. Windows event viewer is basically useless, all it says is "display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.". This so called warning usually happens in pairs within a few milliseconds of each other. I did some reading on this problem and all I found was confusion. No two people seem to have solved the problem in the same way. Stuff I tried:

-Reinstall driver. I did this yesterday with the lastest beta version, was a clean install.

-Increase tdr delay. All this does is keep the artifacts on the screen longer before the driver restarts.

-Decrease OC on CPU. No difference because it's not CPU related.

-Underclock GPU to 700Mhz did nothing.

The first time I ran furmark it managed to run for a whole 30 seconds! I then manually set the fan at 70% and stared at the temperatures, they slowly go up from 50ish at idle up until they hit 71 at which point it instantly crashes. I ran it a couple more times and it doesn't seem to indicate any consistency. Generally it runs for less than 3 minutes and crashes but I just left it running while taking a shower and it didn't crash, maintaining a temp of 85 for about 15 minutes. Next time I run, it crashes after 20 seconds at 66C. Next 54 to 71 in 27 seconds crash.

Attached pic of a crash.

Specs:
Intel Core i7 2600k 4.4GHz 1.320V

16GB RAM 1600Mhz - nothing changed, all default

GTX 580 - defaults once again, driver version 337.50

Windows 8.1 Pro 64bit

Furmark ran in a window 1600x900 on my 1440p monitor

MrBucket101 · April 12, 2014

some stock clocks are too agressive, from the artifacting I would suggest dropping the memory clock...or RMA card

freemini · April 12, 2014

some stock clocks are too agressive, from the artifacting I would suggest dropping the memory clock...or RMA card

I've already tried lowering core to 700 and mem to 1900 but it makes no difference as far as I can tell. I will do some more extreme tests tomorrow on underclock in general though. Will post results.