Hey guys,
I have an almost identical problem with my GTX760 (Gigabyte). There are literally thousands of people with the EXACT same problem, just labeled differently. To me, if it's not a broken card, it's most likely a TDR problem, and the cause of that problem is hard to isolate. (but I am far from knowledgeable on this kind of stuff)
The only way I have gotten it to work is by installing the 322.21 NVIDIA drivers AND increasing the TDR delay time to 8 seconds. Even then, this solution works for about a month, then my drivers start crashing again and I have to spend a day or so repeatedly reinstalling drivers until the computer runs again. I have tried literally every version of the drivers and only 322.21 works for me. I also found not included the HD sound drivers in the installation helped sometimes, but other times it didn't. My last crash occurred after playing BF4 for a few hours, then having an hour break and playing CS:GO. Again this is most likely a coincidence, but last crash I had was a few months ago, after I had been playing BF4 for a while. (In between these two crashes I had not played BF4, because it sucks)
I've contacted both Gigabyte and NVIDIA support, NVIDIA says its Gigabytes fault and all they really said was to replace the card, Gigabyte says it's NVIDIA's fault and to contact them.
I have tried every suggestion I have found online and the only things that have worked are those I mentioned above. There are some other possible sources of the problem which I have read online. (Note these are not my suggestions, I don't know if they're even relevant but when you're trying to fix your computer it's worth a shot).
Some people have said Daemon tools can cause TDR problems. Transparently there is some malware going around which can also cause TDR issues. I have uninstalled Daemon tools, but my computer was already stable when I did, so I can't say if it made a difference.
I have seen someone say it was because they overloaded their power adapter. They solved their problem by plugging the computer straight into the wall.
It's probably not true in my case, but I noticed a bit of freezing if I overloaded my adapter. I didn't properly test this, I just accidentally had a whole lot of things on at once and notice the computer was frozen on startup.
Some people have replaced their cards to find they still have the problem.
Many people have reformatted there computers and had no improvement.
There are a bunch of TDR fixes, the important one is TdrDelay, Microsoft has released a quick 'fix' which sets this delay to 8 seconds. You can find this fix online, or just add the registry entry yourself, there's a bunch of guides on youtube for it.
To check if it is the drivers:
Boot in safe mode, go into event viewer and then search through the logs right before the crash. You may see some critical errors from the NVIDIA dlls, and some system errors saying they're trying to reboot the device. That being said, I have only really seen these errors when I have actually made it to desktop, OR:
Boot in safe mode
uninstall drivers using DDU.
Reboot normally. Your system should run fine.
Install NVIDIA drivers now a few things can happen:
Crash right after the display drivers are installed.
Constant freezing after the display drivers are installed.
Constant freezing towards the end of the installation.
Runs fine after installation but after rebooting you get freezing/crashing.
Runs fine after installation but after attempting to play a game you get freezing/crashing.
In any of these cases you should see driver crash logs in the windows event viewer. In this case increasing the TdrDelay might solve your problem.
Where I am at right now, before I get the card replaced, I'm going to buy a second hard drive (was gonna get one anyway) and install a fresh copy of windows on it, one by one install my drivers (NVIDIA last) and see if it breaks. If it doesn't, then I guess it was a software issue.
Note:
Most of the information I have seen about these issues have been from NVIDIA/Steam forums. There have been some good threads on other gaming forums, but in most cases their solutions are the TdrDelay fix.
Hope this helps at least a little,
Thanks.