Global Conflict

Since yesterday I started having this problem:

At some point my screen randomly goes black, then it says "no signal" which is what it says when I would turn the screen on without the PC being on, I can still hear TS and any in-game sounds in case I was in a game when that happened, then the screen after about 10 secs turn back on and a message pops up in the lower right corner of the screen (next to the windows clock) which says "display driver stopped working and has recovered". I Updated to the latest Nvidia driver today, and problem persisted.

Another variation of the problem is, and this only happens when I'm in-game (any game, and not always), I am playing and then suddenly everything freezes, including the sound which starts to stutter, and then usually screen goes black too.

Both of these variations started yesterday. I don't understand is it my screen dieing, or my graphics card, or is it a driver problem or maybe something like SSD problem, any ideas?

The problem with the drivers crashing is exactly what happens when I overclock my gpu to much and it over heats. Mabey try cleaning your fan on your gpu or if your overclocking turn it off.

My gut instinct is the video card is the problem. You can stress test the video card. But my last 2 Nvidias with problems passed the stress test yet bomb out in FPS. Only helpful fix for me was a hair bump on the GPU voltage. Solid the moment I increased from 1.038 default to 1.050. I'm not a fan of AMDs history of drivers, but at this point, I'm at a lost as to which I would buy tomorrow. Crappy hardware or crappy drivers.

What graphic card do you have?
For how long do you have it?
When did it start happening?

I would also suspect your GPU.
turning off under stress suggests overheating problem. Install msi afterburner (or something else) and check the GPU temperature as your screen turns off.

I had both problems from the beginning and thought is was a memory or BF3 problem. Borderlands 2 ran fine. It went away when I reduced the clock speed by 50 MHz with msi afterburner. I did not investigate if the reason was it overheated. It ran out of spec anyway cause it's a factory overclocked version, and there are other factors like the power supply that can make it fail too.

If it overheats it might help to clean the coolers.

That message is standard and pops up when Windows tries to restart the drivers after the graphic card stops responding.

Zombie's comment makes sense to me. As he mentioned it could also be related to the PSU. The GPU needs more juice under load and maybe the PSU can't provide it reliably so it shuts down. If the card is not overheating check the cabling or try to switch it to a different 6-pin

I have a GTX 480, can't remember for how long I have it though, pretty long....

Anyways, thx for your replies guys, I am quite certain now that it is my graphics card that's causing this. I opened the PC case and sucked all the dust that I could out. I also Installed msi afterburner to monitor the temperature. It seems when my PC just starts up the temp of the GPU is 44 degrees Celsius, and when I play a game it goes up to 90 degrees Celsius. I also did another thing which was said in microsoft support, I went into regedit here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Control\GraphicsDrivers and added a new thing called Tdrdelay and set the value to 8 (not exactly sure what that does though).

After doing all these things today, I didn't have any problems YET. I'll keep monitoring my GPU closely and I'll prolly get another fan in the PC case so it cools the GPU better.

480 starts throttling at 97C, and you where pretty close (but then again, your screen didn't turn off). so i guess its likely your GPU heats up to the point it has to slow itself down, resulting in stuttering, freeze or no signal.

after applying new thermal paste over my GPU, it ran 10 degrees cooler then before. maybe you should consider that as well.

For zombie's similar problem, that might help (basically up voltage/lower clock)
http://www.overclock.net/t/1039216/gtx- ... half-speed

I had a similar issue with the same symptoms that you described in the past on a Windows 6 & Radeon-powered rig, but I was able to fix the issue by reinstalling the operating system. A fresh install of <insert software name> seems to fix a lot of things...

an update, problem persists except when I run the 280.26 nvidia driver, anything more current than that gives me crashing drivers not only in games but in desktop or browsing the internet.

Razy had same problem with his new AMD R9 280
said that bumping the Minimum clock speed (when the GPU is in idle/2D mode) by 50 solved it.
you do it by setting custom profile in the Nvidia settings.

heres some really old post i found. should give you some background
http://www.overclock.net/t/423880/howto ... wnclocking

Maybe you've kicked your pc a bit and card got displaced. I would take it out and put it back in.

.Sup wrote:Maybe you've kicked your pc a bit and card got displaced. I would take it out and put it back in.

I doubt its a hardware problem if it works with a certain driver version.

Necromancer wrote:Razy had same problem with his new AMD R9 280
said that bumping the Minimum clock speed (when the GPU is in idle/2D mode) by 50 solved it.
you do it by setting custom profile in the Nvidia settings.

heres some really old post i found. should give you some background
http://www.overclock.net/t/423880/howto ... wnclocking

Yep, surprisingly in my case just a tiny 50MHz bump to the card's minimum memory speed completely resolved the "Display driver stopped working and has recovered" problem. Prior to that I couldn't even start BF4. The driver would fail as soon as the map started loading. Occasionally I also got that black flash and driver failure notification when browsing the interwebz. Now everything is rock solid (touch wood). Haven't encountered that particular issue since.

RazY70 wrote:

Necromancer wrote:Razy had same problem with his new AMD R9 280
said that bumping the Minimum clock speed (when the GPU is in idle/2D mode) by 50 solved it.
you do it by setting custom profile in the Nvidia settings.

heres some really old post i found. should give you some background
http://www.overclock.net/t/423880/howto ... wnclocking

Yep, surprisingly in my case just a tiny 50MHz bump to the card's minimum memory speed completely resolved the "Display driver stopped working and has recovered" problem. Prior to that I couldn't even start BF4. The driver would fail as soon as the map started loading. Occasionally I also got that black flash and driver failure notification when browsing the interwebz. Now everything is rock solid (touch wood). Haven't encountered that particular issue since.

This was the issue, I did what you did RazY and now it's working fine, special thx to Necro for guiding me step by step how to fix this issue!