2 x PNY GTX 1080 FE crashing Windows 10 (driver 368.25, w/ or w/o SLI)

[afalk42]

I recently built a nice machine (see http://pcpartpicker.com/user/afalk/saved/#view=DGsqqs) that originally had a single MSI GTX 980 Ti card in it and was working rock-solid for the past several months.

I was lucky enough to get two GTX 1080 Founder Edition cards off Amazon last week (PNY manufactured) that shipped on 5/30 and arrived at home yesterday. But I'm having a huge issue with getting either one or both of the cards to run stable. The symptom is always the same: the machine will boot fine, run well for about 2-10 minutes, and then - irrespective of whether I actually put any heavy usage on the GPU - suddenly exhibit one of the following three symptoms or a sequence or combination thereof:

■A scattering of weird white pixels appearing near the task bar or somewhere else on the screen.
■Windows error message: "Display driver stopped responding and has recovered"
■Blue screen

This same crash happens in any of the following different hardware combinations that I've all tried and tested, and none of this has any impact on improving the stability:

• 
  ■Just one GTX 1080 card
  ■Two GTX 1080 cards, not SLI bridged
  ■Two GTX 1080 cards, with 2-way SLI bridge
  ■Two GTX 1080 cards, with 2-way SLI bridge, and the old GTX 980 Ti card still in the machine so I can run PhysX on it

The rest of my hardware can be summed up as Core i7-6700K CPU (overclocking turned off), Gigabyte GA-Z170X-SOC FORCE EATX LGA1151 Motherboard, two Samsung 4K monitors, G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory, Samsung 950 PRO 512GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive. See http://pcpartpicker.com/user/afalk/saved/#view=DGsqqs
So it is all latest technology, modern, latest Windows 10 Pro, latest Firmware, latest drivers (nVidia driver 368.25).

Does anybody have any experience with a similar issue? What other next diagnostic/debugging steps should I undertake?

 

[James Mason]

The white pixels are because of an unstable OC... even if you didn't OC it.
Displaydriver is exactly as stated.
Blue screen needs more info, it's probably a WHEA error... that could mean faulty card(s)

BUT since a simple fix for driver conflicts may solve the entire issue, lets try that first.

If you have graphics or driver issues, one of the most common fixes is a clean uninstall and removal of your graphics drivers.

To uninstall your drivers, first download and run Display Driver Uninstaller, and follow it's recommendations of booting into safe mode and ect.
(This is a direct download link so you don't grab the wrong version)
http://www.guru3d.com/files-get/display-driver-uninstaller-download,20.html

You'll download a compressed file called "[Guru3D.com]-DDU.zip"
Right click and choose extract.
Go into the folder and run the DDU v##.##.exe
This will extract more files to this folder.
Run Display Driver Uninstaller.exe
Choose Yes when it asks you to boot into SafeMode.
After you've rebooted into safe mode.
When DDU comes up, if it hasn't selected your GPU manufacturer (Nvidia/AMD/Intel) then choose it from the drop down list
Press the Clean and Restart option
If a window comes up asking to disable the Windows automatic installation of display drivers click yes.

After (or before removing the old drivers, just put the new ones on the desktop or somewhere handy) rebooting back into Windows, manually download the latest drivers from Nvidia or AMD, don't use auto detect, choose you GPU model and OS from the drop down lists.
Nvidia: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us
AMD: http://support.amd.com/en-us/download

 

[Anurag20]

Apparently NVIDIA has released the 368.25 WHQL-certified game-ready driver especially for the GTX 1080.. ??

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-gtx1080-368-25-driver,31912.html

 

[Eximo]

I tried to install that driver the other day, outright failed on my GTX980 system, going to wait for the next one I suppose.

 

[Guest]

Hi good morning, I've been experiencing a problem similar to yours. A few days ago everything worked me correctly, 2 x 1080 gtx sli that activating the sli and start working or playing in sli gave me error the graphic controller.
I discarded because it was hardware problem because it always worked well and the graphics functioned properly until making me stress testing each separately.
The problem lies "in my case" in the SAMSUNG MAGICIAN application. Where you can modify the OS optimization. That option touches the virtual memory windows and readjusts so you funione the ideal for SDD and Windows.
I modified it to maximum reliability and it all started to go wrong, and I did not realize until a few hours did not think that the problem is being made.
I changed it to maximum performance and everything arranged, everything has returned to normal and stability and I can work and play in sli without any kind of error.
I hope this is your solution or someone looking for an answer to this problem.
Greetings.

PD: Excuse my English, it was translated by google.