NVidia Driver Constantly Crashing

[brandoncatz]

Hi, all, Having a very frustrating issue where the display driver for my MSI N460GTX Hawk keeps crashing whenever utilizing the 3D acceleration. The issue started just a day or two ago out of nowhere as I was loading up the Jungle level on Dead Island. Windows 7 x64 stated that the display driver crashed and recovered, but this occurs also when playing video in Firefox (v7). I have rebooted numerous times. Updated to the latest GeForce drivers (280.26 via "clean" install) and removed all nVidia software while in Safe Mode and re-installed the drivers that originally came with the VGA (259.22). Still having this problem. If anyone has any ideas to help me fix this, please let me know. Thanks in advance!

Oh, also, I did have this issue approximately 6 months ago and was able to eventually get it stable after a few hours of troubleshooting and uninstalling/re-installing different versions of the display driver.

Brandon

 

[badboyzasr]

Try running Furmark, and torture test your cards for about 10-15 minutes. If your cards do the same thing and the drivers stop responding, that means its the card itself, or something wrong with the drivers. If it works fine, that means the games may not be utilizing the right driver options for your card. Ive had some issues with my 560 Ti's with pirated games, but all original bought games work fine.

 

[brandoncatz]

Yah, as I stated it's not just the games, but 3D-enabled browsers, like Firefox, that are suddenly crashing it. I'll try Furmark and see what happens. Doesn't sound like that will give me a definitive answer as to what the problem is (hardware of software). Thanks for the response.

 

[badboyzasr]

Have you overclocked your card by any chance? I am certain this is a card not being stable. Such instances would make your videos show random colors, artifacts in gaming, random driver crashes, system hang ups, freezing of screen, 100% GPU load, etc. Download GPUz and compare your clock speeds with the website's official speeds for this card on MSI. If they both work, try to downclock a little bit for your card. lets say 650/750/790 and see if that lets you run the applications without issues. If it persists, contact MSI tech support, and I am sure if all fails, RMA would be the last resort (which is a pain). Hope it helps.

P.S. you can use Furmark for stability tests after changing core frequencies, etc.