Issue with high-end build when playing games

Ducks1663

Honorable
Feb 18, 2014
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10,540
So, been having this issue for a while now. Just got back to where I can play games again and really wanting to figure out what is going on.

Built this system in February of last year and this issue has been somewhat present. Used to happen once in a blue moon and always thought it was just video driver related... but has since gotten worse to where it's almost any modern game causes all 3 of my screens to go black and all sound to stop. Only way I can do anything is if I shut it off and turn it back on.

Though it might be my old PSU, so just recently purchased a much beefier one but still crashing. Honestly don't know what else I can do. I've ran Memtest for 3 days straight and did like 8 passes and found no faults. I've tried every driver version for my video card since Win 10 came out and they all do the same thing. So either CPU, Mobo, or GPU is faulty?

Previous thread I posted: http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-2909592/issues-playing-games.html

At a loss of what is going on. Sadly no other board, CPU, or GPU to test to see if it's one of those and can't afford to replace them currently. Any suggestions?

Specs;
i7 4790k
Corsair h100i
EVGA GeForce GTX 980 FTW
MSI Gaming 5
4x 8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 @ 1600 MHz
EVGA 1300G2
Radeon R7 240GB SSD
Toshiba 7200RPM 1TB HDD
WD Green 3TB HDD
 


Bleh, for some reason always hit the green button to pick best answer >_<

And have tried. One of the ways I've seen this issue get exponentially worse over the last few weeks. Used to only crash play WoW on ultra.. Could run 3DMark however long I wanted. Now, it does it within the first few seconds to a minute or two in.
 
OK, so the issue still seems to be there. While not nearly as bad (Seems the driver is still crashing... but it's actually recovering so I don't have to power down my system)

Switched out my 980 with an older 660, have sent my 980 out to be RMA'd but still unable to play really any games without the crashing. I've once again tried all possible drivers for the 660 and seems to all be doing this.

Been looking at the event viewer, and this caught my eye;
The description for Event ID 2 from source NVIDIA OpenGL Driver cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.

If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.

The following information was included with the event:

The NVIDIA OpenGL driver has not been able to initialize
a connection with the GPU. This might be due to out of memory error,
an exhaustion of system resources or too many graphical applications running.
The application will not render correctly.


Not sure exactly what could be causing these crashes.. Having this unstable of drivers seems to be a bit far fetched. Talked with my dad about this Mobo (It was a graduation gift) and apparently he had also gotten it at Frys but it had been loose in the box in no anti-static bag... could damage the the board be causing these issues?

Ran 3DMark and http://puu.sh/mIYEQ/dd309235a5.png came up, assuming that's just meaning the video driver crashed. Can plug this GPU into another machine and it runs just fine so assuming either CPU/Mobo are the cause of this. Any ideas on how to figure out exactly what is without buying new ones?