Games crash GTX 660 "Display Driver has stopped working and recovered"

[Lefty Daniels]

Whenever I play a graphics intensive game, such as Skyrim, Battlefield 4, or Borderlands 2, the game will crash around 2-5 minutes into the game.

The crash seems to happen around 67 degrees celsius almost always. I turned up the voltage with EVGA Precision and it crashed at a lower temperature(around 54 degrees) and lowered the voltage and it crashed at a higher temperature(around 70).

I tried turning down all of the settings in Borderlands to keep under this temperature, and it worked for a while, didn't crash for about an hour.

Things I have tried:
-Cleaned out computer with compressed air
-Deleted drivers with Driver Fusion(free version)
-Clean Install of latest drivers from Nvidia(331.82)
-Roll back drivers to 331.65

My computer specs are:

-Thermaltake SMART Series 750w PSU
-EVGA GeForce GTX 660 2GB
-Intel Core i5-3570k Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz
-ASRock z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155
-Corsair Vengeance 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 (only have one stick of RAM)
-Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

The card was working pretty much fine a week ago, with intermittent crashing every once in a while, but those crashes were probably either Mod related(Skyrim) or BF4 related(so many crashes). Now, it happens consistently at around 2-5 minutes in the game when it gets around 67 degrees.

I personally think that my graphics card it going bad. If anyone can offer any support or knowledge on this issue it would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Lefty Daniels]

If there is any additional information that you need to know about my system that would help diagnose the problem, please just let me know and I'll get it to you.

 

[Jaks0n]

I own most of these games and the same card (albeit Sparkle; don't ask) And most of them run on High-Ultra absolutely fine, no overheating - I'm assuming you've messed about with the GPU a lot which won't be helping the GPU stabilise. I suggest testing the GPU on another system with one of the games and see what happens.

 

[Lefty Daniels]

Yeah, I've run all of these games at highest settings for hours with no crashes in the past, just started having these problems this week.

I'll try that, I have a friend who has a 650 that I'm going to put into my system tonight and see if it still crashes, and while we're at it I'll put my 660 in his system and see if it crashes his. This will let me know if it is a graphics card issue or some other hardware issue. I'll post results to that test tonight.

 

[ghostly1]

Almost same problem but my hardware is gigabyte gtx 660, work fine for 2 weeks, but its suddenly got crash when play the witcher 2 (high setting) = the game run for 12 hour++ and Display Driver has stopped working and recovered happen then it hang, so i reset it..

More bad thing happen, the "Display Driver has stopped working and recovered" pop up even on desktop when first start up, so i read tons of article on forum to change nvidia setting "power management mode = prefer performance", i did what things u have tried too,. But not solve it yet, try install win8 pro and got hang when install nvidia driver, but when the nvidia driver not installed (use microsoft adapter driver) the problem not occur. And i think that sometin broken/missing with the driver itself...

i ended found a temporary solution for my prob and try to low all performance my aero desktop if that the problem, "window+pagebreak-->advance system setting--> advance , setting --> adjust for best performance, n its for fine so far, even the "recovered" things appear but not too often as usual.

 

[ghostly1]

The best solution is complain to the vendor n explain ur GPU problems. In my case, i got new hardware and it runs smoothly without any kind of problem. The vendor said that the GPU i use before cant load the resource (i figure what they mean bout GPU load with GPU-Z status http://gpuz.techpowerup.com/14/01/22/gpd.png ) and it user cant do nothin bout that (manufacture defect).

Hope this answer help other

 

[gxonothic]

Yeah, that's what I ended up doing, got a replacement through EVGA. Sorry I never got to post the results to that test, but my friend's 650 ended up working fine in my machine so I don't believe I even ran those tests on his 650. Once we found out it was my 660 and not my machine I put in for a replacement card, problem solved!

BTW this is Lefty Daniels, just using another name.