Card Crashing - GTX 770

[Longbow]

The card is a KFA2 GTX 770, when I play games, especially ones heavy in graphics, the card seems to stop working. I'll see the game freeze for a split second, then hear the fans stop on the card, before it kicks back out to desktop.

I thought initially it was a driver conflict, but I have since then installed a fresh OS.

You can see the large drop just after the dotted line. Card was at 80c.

I've taken the card out and put in back in several times, so it's unlikely to be that.

Power supply is Corsair HX520W which should be sufficient?

Any ideas?

 

[Longbow]

I took out the card, got rid of what little dust there was, I didn't run the fans at 100% but I kept the case cover off and put a big fan next to it, but it still crashed, even though it was still hitting 80c, but when it crashed, it was at 71c:

Edit: Tried it again but forced the fans at 85%, still crashed at 75c.

It's not just CryEngine related as it happens with other games.

Do you have any error reports/warnings in your Event Viewer?

"Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered."

Saying that, I'd try different drivers tbh. I've had one driver that crashed BF4 to desktop four times in three matches. Reset my motherboard BIOS, overclocked my CPU from scratch again and the problem remained until I went back to an older driver. Also from reading recently, the drivers have been causing headaches for some so at least try a few different sets when testing.

Well I installed a newer driver the other day and it doesn't seem to change it, shall I just go back several drivers?

 

[Longbow]

I completely formatted and it's still doing it.

I ran the fans at 100%, and added GPU max temp to the graph. It seems 80c is the max so it was constantly hitting this.

I used Nvidia Inspector to set a frame rate limiter at 75c. It crashed at 78c.

 

[Longbow]

...

I didn't know about that.

I changed it and upped the temp max to 94c. However it still stops, last attempt at 85c, previous attempts at 88c and 90c, max was always set to 94c.

Unless you can see I'm doing something wrong?

I'm going to test it with a different PSU, and I will also test it out on another PC as well, it's really annoying because the graphics in my games now look really good and it runs smooth too, I just can't stop this error from happening regardless of what I've tried.

Let me know how that goes! Unfortunately I don't have another PSU laying around. It sure isn't exceeding the wattage of the PSU though.

 

[Longbow]

An update:



Removed the TIM and re-applied some more.

Temperatures are slightly better, but it was still crashing.

I've set the temp limit lower to 75c and that seems to work. What is weird is before when the temp limit was higher at say 90c, it would sometimes crash at 70c, yet with the limit at 75c, it will happily sit there.