issues with either gtx760 card or software

[soulesstom]

a little while ago i bought my friends old gaming computer but he upgraded the card for me. for a while the computer worked fine but as i started to play more games on it, the more the games crashed. friend came over and took a looked and lowered the gpu clock and messed with the fan curve.

it worked fine for a while till one day it the monitor when to sleep while the computer wasn't asleep. thought nothing of this and just restarted the computer since it wasn't responding to any keys being pressed. after this when ever i played any games the gpu went back up to around 40% and my games started to crash again. the setting my friend tweaked remained the same though. after a few days the computer kinda "fixed" it self or what it seemed that while for i could play any game on my computer with out it crashing and the gpu remained the leveled.

well computer did it again and not the frame gpu is high and games are again crashing. the only thing my friend says is its because i have virus protection and have downloaded a few things from the net, but i don't think its because of that. he says the only way to find the issue if for him to wipe it clean and start over or use a second hard drive and switch between one for gaming and one for other stuff.

since i don't want to deal with that hassle and i rather keep my computer i decided to ask for help. any idea what might be causing this?

card is a GeForce GTX 760 with updated drivers (first thing i tried both times),os is windows 7 for home, and the virus protection is kaspersky if that helps

 

[smorizio]

blanking out can be a heat issue or a power issue. start with running hardware monitor check your cpu temps. if the pc a few years old the cpu paste may have dried out or the cpu fan not on tight if it using the stock intel cpu fan. look at the power supply in the pc look at the make and the wattage. if it an older 200-400w unit it may have a cap or part that not aging well. if you have a friend that has a spare unit try it and see if the rig runs better.

 

[soulesstom]

blanking out can be a heat issue or a power issue. start with running hardware monitor check your cpu temps. if the pc a few years old the cpu paste may have dried out or the cpu fan not on tight if it using the stock intel cpu fan. look at the power supply in the pc look at the make and the wattage. if it an older 200-400w unit it may have a cap or part that not aging well. if you have a friend that has a spare unit try it and see if the rig runs better.

my friend has it set were it shows the inside temp and it never goes above 50C and the power supply is 850 watts, i believe, i remember my friend telling me he just got it and was good. he never had an issue with it before so i think it might just be the graphic card. also it seemed that the power didn't flicker. the monitor went to sleep because it couldn't detect any signal from the computer...