Computer rebooting at random after buying GTX 760 graphics card

Hi,

You may want to download bluescreenview and poost us the details, might have clues what makes it crash.
What GPU did you have before. You might want to cleanup the GPU drivers and do a fresh install.

I'd give it a try anyway. My understanding is that there are some system settings that can result in your machine simply rebooting instead of going to an actual blue screen, even though the problem would normally result in a blue screen. If that's the case, crash logs may still be present for BlueScreenView to parse through.

I've been having this exact same problem and I think I've narrowed it down to either a PSU or GPU issue (my current PSU is a cruddy off-brand and I just ordered a new seasonic 650w so i'll let you know if that solves my problem). How long have you had the current PC before you bought the 760? For me I've had my PC for about 1 year, and everything worked perfectly for the first 6 months and then (without any hardware changes whatsoever) it started happening. It's exactly like you're saying, I'll be playing a graphically intensive game and at random times *click* everything instantly dies, and after a second or two the PC automatically boots back up. It almost never happens if I'm playing something simple like Spelunky.

Also what I've noticed is that whenever I start up a game like devil may cry, path of exile, etc, I can hear a "coil whine" electrical zapping sound coming from my GTX 550 ti and the card temperature almost instantly shoots up from 90F to 150F, even if I downsize the game to the desktop the coil whine noise instantly stops and the temperature drops back down to 90F after a few seconds. Then as soon as I bring the game back up the noise comes back and temperature goes back up to 150F fairly quickly. I didn't think it had anything to do with heat in the past because I would check temperatures AFTER a reboot would occur which everything looked normal probably because the card had cooled down quite a bit since the restart.

I wouldn't think 150F video card temperature is enough to cause crashes like that but it does seem unusually hot, especially for how quickly it shoots up to 150F after simply opening a game and not even having to play at all, the coil whine noise starts and the temperature skyrockets. What temperature does your card run at when you're playing watchdogs? After playing for a few minutes downsize it and open a temperature monitoring program (you can find many of these by googling, or rather look for a thread on here of someone asking for temperature program recommendations so you don't get jerked around by google search advertisements :lol

150 °F is only 65 °C, which is an excellent temperature while gaming. Its normal for the temperature to rapidly increase back to its normal load temperature when you return to a game (because GPU usage will also shoot back up to 100%). If your video card is having problems, its not temperature related. Coil whine is usually not indicative of a problem with the card, but its very annoying and often worth a warranty claim.

I too thought OP's power supply might be involved, but the fact that he said he's crashing everywhere BUT in games (that is, at times of low PSU load and lower temperatures) makes that seem less likely. Sounds a lot more like driver-related crashing, and he's just not seeing the usual BSoDs for a variety of possible reasons.

Sorry for the randomness, but I just noticed this. When you install drivers, they put a lot of stuff into the system registry as well, stuff that you can't easily see (unless you're really, really pro at RegEdit, anyway). Those entries may not always get completely deleted when you uninstall. The files and folders that you're able to see and delete manually are the least concern, chances are they were already inert.

If it had been me, I'd have just planned to reformat/reinstall Windows at the same time I installed the new video card. Maybe more of a pain in the ass, but its a good way to be sure.

Alternatively, you can try software like CCleaner (the registry clean part) or Driver Uninstaller to get rid of all the AMD stuff that may be left behind in the registry and system files.

What manufacturer made the GTX 760, and are you using the driver that came on a disc with the card, from the manufacturers site, or nvidias site?

Got my PSU (SeaSonic S12II 620w) on friday and haven't had any reboots since, although it has gone a few days without rebooting in the past so I am in no way out of the frying pan but at least it's looking promising. Especially since I was gaming all day saturday & sunday and it seemed to happen primarily on those two days (probably because it would be running all day as opposed to just a few hours per night on weeknights). I'll let you know if the new PSU has fixed my problem or not.

The only other thing I can think of (aside from the new GPU itself even thought it only happens when you're not gaming) would be memory; looking back through the thread I don't see any mention of that, so:

1) Do you have multiple sticks of memory? Such that you can try 1 stick at a time and see if it crashes?
2) Can you run memtest and see if any errors come back?

I looked up zotac GTX 760's on newegg and found two: one has 4GB memory and the other is 2GB and OC'd, but both say recommended minimum PSU is 600w... how much memory is yours and did it come overclocked straight from the manufacturer? This seems to fit your situation perfectly too; the card is drawing too much power and causing random restarts

Is it receiving enough power?

Check event viewer under Windows Logs > System, if there are Event 41 - Kernel Power "The system rebooted without cleanly shutting down, etc, etc" then I would bet money it's PSU-related

You can just replace the PSU... I would recommend something like (depending on budget):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151137&cm_re=Seasonic_650-_-17-151-137-_-Product
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817171089&cm_re=cooler_master_750w-_-17-171-089-_-Product

The only thing you've gotta make sure of is what all kinds of connectors you need. Look through your system and check what all your PSU is connected to, you've probably got:

A large 24 pin connected to motheboard
Either a 4 or 8 pin connected to motherboard
6 pin connected to video card
Sata (or possibly molex) connected to HDD, dvd/cd drives, etc
(either of the above recommendations will suffice if this is the case)

If the above recommendations are too pricey take a look at this:

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-1804779/power-supply-unit-tier-list.html

PSU's organized into "tiers" (aka ranked by quality/reliability). I probably wouldn't go below a 650w/620w