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nvidia driver crashing then recovering

Soldato
Joined
4 Dec 2002
Posts
4,015
Location
Bourne, Lincs
First my specs

I have C2D E6400 not clocked, 4Gb PC6400 ram, 4 x sata hdds, 1 x PATA dvd writer and a BFG 285GTXOC2 and a Corsair 520W PSU.

Second my problem

When I play games Alien Swarm, L4D, TF2 etc, most via Steam of all things, my nvidia driver will crash and recover, causing the game to drop to desktop, then back to the game, which is annoying to say the least.

But I can play games like Starcraft 2, Just Cause 2, Crysis all on full gfx for hours without an issue.

I have reinstalled windows recently and using the latest version of nVidia drivers, so I have no idea what could be doing this.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks

Kimbie
 
No idea on the GPU temps, as to be honest I have not idea what software I can use on Win7 64bit to check these things.

I know they use to be in the drivers but not any more, unless they are buried under an obscure setting.

If you can point me in the direction of the software that will let me check temps and clocks I will give it a go

Thanks

Kimbie
 
Had exactly the same problem with a BFG 275 OCX. (Some Steam games, Mass Effect and Borderlands)

RMA'd the card once, and the replacement did exactly the same thing. Had the card checked out by a local component shop and it was fine.

Discussed the issue with the owner and he said that a similar problem arose in Windows Vista that they saw all the time. (He blamed nVidia but it seems to be a BFG problem.)

Seems that with some hardware configs, 200 series BFG cards and Win 7 64 bit this can happen. I sold my card on, which works fine and got a 5770 and am having no issues what so ever.
 
I doubt because it's a BFG card it had issues with steam.

Could be the 'overclocked' BFG cards being unstable. The other option is that its an nVidia issue. Or, most likely, I am completely wrong and just couldn't diagnose the problem on my machine.

Wasn't just Steam on mine, Mass Effect (from the disc) was the worst offender.

Game would minimise or crash to desktop with a small message saying "Graphics drivers have stopped working and been recovered" or something similar.

Might just be that I am too much of a rookie (High possibility) to understand what was going on. I posted about it on here and discussed it with BFG to try and resolve the problem.
 
This happens to me randomly, but only on Source-engine games.... I have no idea what the reason is! Hopefully it will go away once I upgrade to Windows 7 :p
 
Ive had similar problems with a couple of recent Nvidia drivers sets.

Never got to the bottom of the problem, just bad drivers IMO.
 
Well RavenXXX2 seemed to have the answer, the temps seemed fine to me sat around 80oC but when I dropped the clock by 15mhz not had a problem since.

So thanks

Kimbie
 
Ive had similar problems with a couple of recent Nvidia drivers sets.

Never got to the bottom of the problem, just bad drivers IMO.

:D

Well RavenXXX2 seemed to have the answer, the temps seemed fine to me sat around 80oC but when I dropped the clock by 15mhz not had a problem since.

So thanks

Kimbie

Either that or up the voltage by a notch - if you can. I had to do that recently because of the driver recovery thing that occurred to me once.
 
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