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13fist · ‎10-14-2013

Alright. This is what happened.
about 20 hrs ago I launched skyrim and noticed it was a little slow. Not real bad, but after a few minutes I decided to save and have a look at my settings. No overclock or anything and no issues before now.

SO, immediately after closing skyrim I see the little alert at the task bar that the "display driver stopped responding and has recovered". Event viewer shows this happens about 1 - 2 seconds. This is very sad, that the screen goes black every 1-2 seconds.
The strange part. IF I can get skyrim or another game to launch, it is stable. I just played for an hour without issues but as soon as I exit the game the problem is back. If I leave the it alone it will just sit here and the screen will flash endlessly.

MSIafterburner shows that the core and mem clocks are running maxed, this is when it is working, then dives right before the driver crash.
Looks like an almost perfect sqaurewave, each trough marks a black screen.

I have been up trying to fix this and NOTHING has worked. I've been trying the last several drivers with no change. I am completely baffled on this one and really need some help here.

Dreamonic · ‎10-14-2013

I know you've tried different driver versions, but have you changed the PhysX processor to anything but Auto in the NVIDIA Control Panel? Sometimes setting it to GPU instead of CPU or Auto stops the crashing. It's possible a Windows Update or driver elsewhere is conflicting with the display drivers.

Besides reformatting and starting fresh with just drivers installed and a game to test out, have you tried making a second account and loading the game from there? Possibly something on startup or in services is being loaded for the currently used User account.

Since the card can run stable given the right conditions, sounds to me like software or driver related.

13fist · ‎10-14-2013

Thank you for the assist. I tried starting in different account and no change. The physx, no change. Whatever the conflict I cannot seem to find it. Google is showing this is a very common issue blamed on everything from vram going bad to old bitcoin virus. Ofcourse I'd like o avoid replacing the video card. I'm going to keep at the software side of this a little longer. If nothing works soon, I'm going to physically take a look. I never got around to doing a repaste so perhaps its the cheesy thermal compound finally drying out or melting off? just guessing at this point.

Dreamonic · ‎10-14-2013

Then I would format and install Windows again. If all you can do is the factory restore method, then to zero any chance of it being software on your current system, do it. Just be sure to backup your stuff before going through with it.

Temps would cause throttling and when it throttles, boost state no longer works until you restart IIRC. So unless you seen ridiculous temps during your gaming sessions, repasting would only correct this. Not worth doing if the above mentioned doesn't resolve the problem, that would most likely mean hardware related.

It could be possible that your AC adapter is starting to show signs of wear and or battery malfunctioning because of it.

Try using just the AC adapter with battery removed, or you can use just the battery and remove the AC adapter. You'll get massive lag being on just battery, but this will show you whether you still get black screens or not.

I'm sure you are on the correct Power plan -> High Performance.

Hope something works out for you.

mehdi_moha · ‎10-14-2013

Dreamonic wrote:
Then I would format and install Windows again. If all you can do is the factory restore method, then to zero any chance of it being software on your current system, do it. Just be sure to backup your stuff before going through with it.

Temps would cause throttling and when it throttles, boost state no longer works until you restart IIRC. So unless you seen ridiculous temps during your gaming sessions, repasting would only correct this. Not worth doing if the above mentioned doesn't resolve the problem, that would most likely mean hardware related.

It could be possible that your AC adapter is starting to show signs of wear and or battery malfunctioning because of it.

Try using just the AC adapter with battery removed, or you can use just the battery and remove the AC adapter. You'll get massive lag being on just battery, but this will show you whether you still get black screens or not.

I'm sure you are on the correct Power plan -> High Performance.

Hope something works out for you.

i think on this kind of case , reset the os via recovey-partition or recovery-disk is the best way

13fist · ‎10-15-2013

woops double tap

13fist · ‎10-15-2013

Temps never appear to go above 45c while it is doing this. I am about to do a fresh install. I gave everything else a shot, even booted into ubuntu and the problem is there aswell. pretty much convinced this is hardware at this point.

While in safemode/vgasave or linux the problem is non existent until nvidia drivers are intalled/loaded. If I could live with 800x600 and no acceleration I'd be set. lol
anyway, after I get the last of my stuff backed up I'll report back if a clean install worked or not. After that im going in to have a look for damaged traces, burn marks or the like. I dont know what else I can do at this point.

Thanks again for the help guys, I need all I can get on this one.

13fist · ‎10-16-2013

OK. It's fixed.
I'm only guessing but I think it was condensation. A clean install did not help so I opened it up and noticed a light moisture inside. This may or may not have had anything to do with it. I did leave it out in my truck for several hours before taking it into my room. It was cold and wet outside so when I brought it in and started it up it was pretty chill for a bit. After waving a hair dryer over the inside I put it back together enough to test it out and bingo, everything was good again.
I went ahead and re-pasted with antec F7 while I had it apart so there is that much out of the way. I will say the stock thermal pads looked to be in good shape so I left them alone and used the F7 stuff on the cpu & gpu. Already noticing an improvement.

Truth is, I may never know what the cause was or if what I did solved it. I'm just glad it's working now.
Thanks for all the help!

I think I finally broke it. 660m gone crazy