First off... I think I've officially been in the ROG database for a little while, but this is my first thread on the forum (as far as I recall) so with that... Greetings to everyone, and thank you for having me here.

Right, so down to the heart of the issue. Recently I purchased an RTX 2060 overclocked edition from Walmart (Initially), That particular card came with bad ports (not even kidding you) so I had to return it to Walmart who had since raised their prices and said I'd have to buy a new one at $10 more, so I went and bought a second card (this is two cards, just for reference) from Newegg.

So, with this new 2060 in hand, I installed it. Now I'd already installed the drivers for the other 2060 (Both OC editions) so I didn't think I would need to install them again. However, while playing Anthem, I was experiencing an issue where the screen would go black, sometimes within a few short minutes of launching the game. Foolishly I didn't check the event log at the time, and obviously couldn't see the error itself because the monitor had lost all signal and was not coming back up period, forcing me to hard restart. At the time, this seemed only to be exclusively happening in Anthem and none of the other games I played (Battlefield 5, Conan Exiles, etc.) Curiously at the same time, I'd come to notice (Through Asus's GPU tweak II) that the card was not fully idling down. It was stopping at like 1365mhz even just on the desktop and not doing anything else. I made sure the drivers and the game were both up to date, but the problem persisted. Eventually however, I used DDU and just outright purged the graphics drivers before reinstalling new ones. This fixed my issue... or so I thought.

Fast forward about a week, and I'm playing Anthem when suddenly the screen goes black on me like It had before. At this point I was ready to attribute it to an 'Anthem issue' given that I'd read it was doing it to not only consoles but other PCs. However, the next day I'm playing Conan Exiles and the same thing happened. So I had a look in my Event Viewer and found the dreaded 'Driver nvlddmkm' has crashed and successfully recovered error (except obviously it hadn't.. darn black screen). So far, it's going to black screen and nothing but a hard power off and starting it back up again seems to be fixing it. Notably, this issue is now only occurring after I have been playing games for some time. It's usually at least an hour into a session (or after I've been playing something else for a while) that it'll happen. I might assume that it's a heat issue, if it weren't for the fact that I've never seen the card push past 60C when I had the GPU Tweak software installed. And my CPU has never shown particularly high temps, even when overclocked under an air cooler (I would think that if the CPU is not getting hot while OCed under air, that the rest of the board shouldn't be at too much risk for being overheated, if I was using water cooling it'd be a different story... or so I'd think)

Naturally I googled the error and found some answers, even on this forum itself, but so far... All the solutions that I've seen have not produced any real solution to the problem.

So far I have:
Fresh drivers (from the DDU clean/install... I could certainly try again I guess? But I don't know if it would make a difference)
Done /sfc scannow and both DISM commands
returned both CPU and RAM to stock levels (From 4.54GhZ and 3k Mhz respectively)
uninstalled GPU tweak II (heard that programs polling the GPU can cause the TDR to trip)
Increased the TDR delay to 10 seconds
ran a check disk on my OS SSD
Replaced my PSU (thought it was the problem with my last RTX 2060 from Walmart, so replaced my EVGA PSU with a Corsair RM850x)
Did a mem test on the RAM
Set my power profile to high and went into 3D settings and told my card to use Max power

At this point, Most of the threads I've seen have either solved the issue with one of the above solutions or have gone unresolved where the poster stops posting and never tells anyone whether anything worked or not... so I'm stumped and I am hoping that someone here may have a solution to my problem.


For reference, although I think my profile should also have the info, my current Rig is:

Z-270 Prime A Mobo
Intel I5 7600k
Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3000 mhz RAM (CMU16GX4M2C3000C15)
RTX 2060 ROG Strix OC
Intel 530 240 GB SSD
Win 10 Home (up to date)
Creative Soundblaster Z audio card
Corsair RM850x PSU

Thank you for your time and if you need anymore information, I'll try to provide it to the best of my abilities.