Graphics driver crash, help!

Emjay86

Emjay86

Emjay86

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2 Apr 2011
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Hey guys!

Im experiencing a graphics driver crash during gameplay and its really annoying me. Ive tried reading up on the internet what causes this and it seems to happen to random games. Ive had it happen recently on War Thunder, Company of Heroes 2 and Vermintide. My card is a 970 GTX and its using the most recent drivers. This problem however has been on and off for a good couple of months and almost to a year now.

One thing however ive noticed that just made me think is everytime it happens I get an audible click noise from the hard drive. Is that an indication of the HDD being faulty? Its about 4-5 years old now and its used for steam games, which if im correct is the only library of games on my machine that has this issue. None of my Origin, UPLAY and whatever else has this issue and they are all on a separate drive.

When the crash happens I get a black screen and the PC keeps running, the keyboard can also still be used allowing me to alt+f4 out of the game in question. I cannot however from here restart the graphics driver and always have to end up hard restarting the system.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance!
 
I suppose the real litmus test would be to reinstall one of the games causing the problem onto a different drive and see if the issue resurfaces.
 
Ive got MSI afterburner running and I noticed that when the crash happens my MSI Afterburner displays the temp of the card as 0 degrees and the usage is like an 8 digit number. Any ideas if that might be telling something?
 
It's a Windows, mate - it's all about a *mess* inside (which majority of users is not aware of).
Try to (1) reinstall graphic driver with "clean" option and (2) reinstall newest Afterburner revision.
If that won't help, try to underclock your graphic card with Afterburner (both GPU and memory - for about 150 MHz), because it might be either GPU overheating, or undervolting (for now, not for a moment when factory set up voltages = as card degrades in time) if it was factory overclocked.

Drive: launch CrystalDiskInfo and see SMART report, if there are any warnings.
 
I MAY have sussed it out and if its the case its a bit ridiculous.

Basically I had a crash last night and figured id investigate physically what was going on. Im not 100% sure but I think my GPU may have not been fully connected, it seemed to be 'sitting' strangely and so I took it out, cleaned all the connections and put it back in.

I also swapped over the power cables for the GPU with a newer pair and have to say since then ive not had any crackle noise or crashing. *touch wood*.

It COULD also be the new beta drivers I got from Nvidia however, who knows.
 
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