680 GTX Nvidia Display driver has stopped responding

[scamartist]

Was watching a live football stream last night and after a few screen flickers I got a black screen.

This happened for about 5-10 seconds and then display returned but there was a popup in the taskbar saying that the display driver had stopped responding.

This has never happened before so I installed latest Nvidia driver and it kept doing the same every 10 minutes or so.

This occurs both in game and during desktop use.

Does anyone know if this is a hardware issue?

 

[scamartist]

The card has never been overclocked and has worked flawlessly for the last 9 months since purchase.

After I installed latest driver and the problem persisted I thought RMA straight away.

Its an Asus card as well so I'm surprised at it failing so quick.

 

[scamartist]

I only changed my drivers after the issue started.

Previous to that it never missed a beat gaming desktop or otherwise.

Will have a quick try at a couple of things tonight just to make sure I haven't done anything silly.

Then its time to start looking at the RMA process.

 

[scamartist]

Found out the cause of my problems.

Seems I had a sneaky virus installed on my computer which was using my 680 to mine bitcoins. Virus is probably not the best description as AV software wont pick it up but definitely unwanted malware.

Noticed I had a program called iehighutil.exe running in taskmanager and after a bit of Googling discovered what it did and how to get shot of it.

Haven't had a single graphics driver issue since.