NVidia 347.88 Display driver keeps crashing on GTX 960

[MikeyzDragon]

The display driver will random crash on my while playing games (Rift, Guild Wars 2, WoW, FF-13) and I can't quite figure it out. It was fine the first week but now I'm plagued with these crashes.

GPU idles 45-50C when Overclocked to 1555MHz and 40-45C when at standard settings according to EVGA PrecisionX 16. I have the CPU overclocked to 4.0GHz which idles at 42C and 1.360V under load. It will crash OC'ing and using the standard settings for the graphics card and CPU.

Specs:
OS: Windows 7 64-bit
MB: MSI 970A-G43
CPU: FX-6300 6-core Black Edition
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 960 SSC 4GB
PSU: EVGA SuperNova NEX650G (650W Gold)
RAM: 16GB (2x8GB) Corsair Vengeance 1600MHz
HDD: 1 TB Western Digital 3.5" Hard Drive
Nvidia Display Drive: 347.88

Thank you.

 

[KnowJBridges]

From what I can tell that card comes with a factory overclock. (as most do)

I had driver crashes start to happen with my MSI-970 recently, and found out that it wasn't able to handle the factory overclock, but I could fix it by underclocking by around -25Mhz or so. You might want to try the same.

 

[kowtown]

I had a gtx 960 that wouldn't stop crashing until I turned on a "Basic and High Contrast Theme" in Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization > Personalization.

Basically, disabled aero theme.

This lessened the crashes, but they still happened on occasion when I was browsing the Internet. I had to disable Firefox Hardware Accel. In my version, Pancake button @ top right > options > advanced tab > underneath browsing clear the box marked "Use hardware acceleration when available."

My card works just fine in games.

 

[kowtown]

GTX 960 wouldn't stop crashing until I downloaded evga precisionx 16 off steam, enabled kboost on the right to lock the card at max speed. Even got a steam achievement for doing it. It costs a little more in power but the card doesn't crash anymore whenever it clocks up and down due to load.

I'm crash free with aero, hw accel and all games ever since. If you're crashing with a 900 series nvidia card on recent drivers, you need to try this.