Mains power issue; "Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver [...] stopped responding and has successfully recovered"

Hi all,

Bit of an odd one for you, but first some background, as it might help anyone with a similar problem.

About this time last year I built a computer with a friend and was thrilled with the results for a while. However, after a couple of weeks I started getting that critical "Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 327.23 stopped responding and has successfully recovered" issue, preceded by the display freezing for a few seconds at a time, not registering movements of the mouse or anything like that, the screen flashing from time to time and the audio playback jarring. This would often happen when running games that place a reasonably but not excessively high demand on the system, such as Total War Rome II, Mount and Blade or Skyrim with high settings.

After running through a number of software-related solutions online without success and trying the obvious steps of rolling back various drivers/ clean OS installs, I spent a couple of months speaking to Ebuyer about potential hardware issues that could have been the cause, sending in various components (including the GPU on multiple occasions) and getting replacements/ told they were testing fine.

Around this time I had to temporarily vacate the room and I ended up moving the setup with me. To my surprise, I found I couldn't reproduce the issue any more. As it then seemed obvious that two months of faffing was simply down to crappy plug sockets in the first room, my girlfriend agreed to me turning the flat upside down so I could have the computer by the working mains socket. So far, so good. I also got my hands on a APC BE700G-UK uninterruptible power supply, hoping that it would prevent a reemergence of the issue.

Since the new year however, the original symptoms have been reappearing, despite the UPS. Past experience suggests the plug socket is to blame, but I'm wary of getting the landlord to call an electrician in because the problem is sporadic and presumably wouldn't happen if I were only running something with a slightly lower power demand. As I've spelled out above, I don't think the actual computer is to blame, but the basic setup is below in case anything obviously wrong jumps out. The power supply calculators I've seen reckon something like 70W and 340W for idle and load power respectively.

Intel Core i7 4790K processor
Asus Z97-A motherboard
GTX 760 GPU
Kingston SSDNow V300
WD 1TB Blue Harddrive, 7200rpm
16GB 1866MHz DDR3 ram, HyperX Fury Black Series
Acer 21.5" monitor
EVGA Supernova 750W Fully Modular 80+ Gold Power Supply

So, my question is: has anybody experienced this or had a similar issue? Is it possible for mid-range PC to ah heck a wall socket? Does this sound like something that an electrician would be able to diagnose and fix? Would a voltage regulator make the difference, and if so do any come recommended?

Thanks in advance for any contributions - any thoughts on this would be really welcome,
Alex



p.s. Hopefully this is the right category - please give me a shout if it should be somewhere else, and let me know where to put it.

On my Nvidia drivers i would get the display driver message and it would freeze. Hard boot and after doing this for an hour it would suddenly work and it would work all night and the next day but it was hot and i mean hot it would be to hot to set on your lap thats for sure. If it got any hotter it would shut down and that was it for a couple of hours. Now it doesnt matter hot cold doesnt matter i cant keep anything running and i've gone thru 4 brand new computers off the shelf in 2 weeks. Today i go and get one set up with out Nvidia drivers and see what happens. I think its them. If you look at all the boards and the posts its pretty obvious. I mean if the had signs out from of a car dealer that had 2 million people complaining about this one type of car that made their lives hell. would you go in and buy it? Im not any more