GeForce Driver Crash and then Recovers

[HazMatt]

My System: (all new parts)
Vista Home Premium SP1
CPU - Intel Quad 9550
MB - Asus Maximus II Formula
RAM - 2x2G OCZ Reaper PC28500 DDR2 1066 (4 gig total)
GPU - BFG GTX260 OC
PSU - Antec 850W True Power Quattro
SC - Creative XFI
HD - Seagate SATA 1TB 7200RPM 32 MB Cache

I have a consistent crash where I am sent to desktop where it states that my video card drivers have recovered from a failure. This happens whenever I am running anything graphically intensive: FarCry 2, Crysis and the 3D mark 06 benchmark. When I run Aquamark I have no problems and am achieving scores up to 180,000. 3D Mark 03 will sometimes finish and other times freeze. Wierd huh? I have changed out the MB, PSU, Video Card and the Sound Card. I am running entire system stock, no overclocking. I have been at this for weeks and I am at my wits end. I even popped in an ATI 4870, thinking it was specifically an Nvidia driver issue, in the machine and still had a driver failure. I have wiped the drivers clean and re-installed (now running geforce v180.43 and also tried v178.24). I have updated the bios and the chipset to the newest available. I have checked the ram settings. According to BFG you have to have a PSU "with a 12V rail at least 11.9 or above and 38 + amps on the 12v rail" - whatever that means I have no idea. What I do know is that I have a top of the line and modern PSU, so I would think that would not be the problem. I have built over 30 systems in my time and NEVER had a problem like this. Ahhhhhhhhhh...Please help me! Somebody! (can ya tell i'm desperate).
Thanks in advance - Matt.

 

[noobe1981]

Sorry, but I got to say a driver problem. Have you made sure to compeletly unistall all previous drivers of ati/geforce. And have you tried different ones. I know my ati was freezing up, and locking up my whole computer. But once I went back a couple drivers it worked just fine, and hasn't done it since then.

 

[HazMatt]

Thanx for the prompt reply. Yes I did all that but roll the driver back more than 2 versions. I used Guru Drivesweeper, uninstalled in safemode, etc.
I will try and find older drivers and report back. Thanks again.

 

[HazMatt]

Update: working with driver v180.43 i have all demos and benchmarks working with great results, including vantage. But when running Farcry 2 and Fallout 3 i keep crashing. Anyone?
Thanks in advance.

 

[aliomattux]

Hi, I have a similar issue that I may have resloved. I have 2 260GTX with the driver failure and it turns out "think this was the issue" that I had several 12V rails but only two of them had 28A and I had them plugged into one video card so basically one card was getting considerably more power than the other one. My rig only crashed when in SLI mode. The Amperage is critical to your video card. 36A means that you need 2 12V rails that are rated at 18A each totalling 36A. If you check newegg.com it will show you what each rail is rated at. Also you can get everest from a torrent site. Everest can tell you what voltage is running through your cards to let you know if it is a psu issue. Even if you dont think it is, it is better to do process of elimination. Also check to see if some of your 12V rails are higher than 18A because just meeting the minimum spec might cause it to crash.
Other things you can do is run memtest86 on each of your ram chips individually so let you know for sure if the memory is bad. Try resetting your bios by using the clear cmos feature. You could try using older drivers instead that may help. Also try using bare minimum hardware and software that will help. If you try to different cards and the same result it is not a coincidence. Monitor your system voltages in the bios to make sure everything is getting enough power.