Question GTX 970 Lock ups etc

Aug 9, 2019
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Recently I have started having issues with my graphics card, the one listed in the title (Nvidia GTX 970), where games I am playing will suddenly lock up for a few seconds. As far as I can tell, the only thing that correlates time wise with the beginning of these issues is the update of my GPU drivers to the latest version. With hardware monitors open it shows that both GPU and CPU Usage drop drastically during these freezes. The temps for all hardware remain within reasonable ranges during game and the freezes. The games I have experienced these issues include World of Warcraft, Space Engineers, Total War: Warhammer II, and Empyrion Galactic Survival. Both SE and EG will outright close with no error messages when these freezes occur, however WoW usually recovers. Total War Warhammer II will also lock up , but then the screen displays Black, Green, and White squares which occasionally have menu text on them and then recovers. I have also played CSGO and Stellaris (a Grand Strategy game) and have had no issues with those games.

I have tried doing a complete clean reinstall of the latest drivers, and I have tried a complete clean install of previous versions. Reverting to the version 430.86 drivers from May seemed to resolve the issue for about 18-20 hours before it returned.

Any advice for a fix here?
Additionaly info:
Asus Z87-Plus Motherboard (1150 ports)
GTX 970 Nvidia Card
16gbs ram (2x8G)
2 WD HDDs (1tb and 2tb)
1 SSD Samsung 850 EVO 250gb

Side note, I am new to the forums here, I have a picture of what my screen looks like in WHII when it locks up but I am unsure how to attach the image. I will post it if someone enlightens me as to the proper method!
 
That looks like a screen corruption issue. Do other games also exhibit this kind of behavior ? Could this be a bad/corrupted GPU driver issue, or maybe some Game files are corrupt ?

I also suspect a faulty GPU though. But can you check your GPU by using some other power supply unit ?
 
Aug 9, 2019
4
0
10
I've verified the game files of the games. It affects several games but not some others. I listed some of them in my OP. I have just reset to an even older version of my GPU drivers. I uninstalled them in the control panel first and then did a clean install. I do not have geforce experience installed. I don't really have a way to test it with a different PSU. Any other way to test it? Another thing I didn't originally note, it affects games across multiple drives. It affects a game on my SSD, and and on both of my mechanical drives.