Random Gaming Crashes - GTX 680

Jordo141

Honorable
Jul 10, 2012
13
0
10,510
Hey everyone.

So basically this year I won a voucher for a new Alienware PC. I would never buy their machines myself, but since I was getting one cheap I dove in. My system specs should be in my sig. I can provide a Belarc audit of the machine and a DxDiag.

Now down to the issue: My system should be about to play pretty much any game at maximum settings without much trouble, as you would see from my specs. However, when gaming, the system would hang for a few seconds and then; bluescreen. The bluescreen mentions that the system failed to retrieve the device driver.

Image:
http://i.imgur.com/ZlW1Y.jpg

These crashes are seemingly totally random. I was thinking that perhaps it was an overheating issue, but I've been monitoring GPU temperatures and nothing is ever even reaching 70'C. There is plenty of RAM that isn't even being occupied and no background programs are being run, with the exception of anti-virus (which I can very safely conclude no malware ever on my machine). I've disabled all startup items that aren't needed.

I tried reinstalling the latest drivers using safe mode and Driver Sweeper after uninstalling everything first... With zero success... :/

I must add here that several games are crashing on me, weather they be high spec games such as Witcher 2, or stuff like World of Tanks that should run without no problems. I only have had crashes in game, no slowdown or issues outside gaming.

I found a useful page on the Nividia forums, but I can't get to it because the forums are temporally down. It was based about how to correctly get the driver's working. It was for the exact error I kept coming up with but after following the steps the same problem is present. When the forums are back I'll try to find this page.

Must mention nothing is overclocked or tampered at all; or anything else tampered with in a dangerous fashion (to my knowledge).

I'm pretty sure it's not a CPU or memory issue. I think the problem is with either the card itself or it's drivers, the PSU or perhaps my display output.

After throwing down a considerable amount of money on this machine it's very annoying to be having these problems.

Thanks in advance for anyone taking the time to help out :).

Some specs:
Windows 7 Home Premium (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)

3.20 gigahertz Intel Core i7-3930K
No memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (6 total)
Hyper-threaded (12 total)

Board: Alienware 07JNH0 A00
Serial Number: ..CN697022490724.
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz
BIOS: Alienware A03 02/08/2012

8146 Megabytes Usable Installed Memory

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 [Display adapter]
DELL ST2320L [Monitor] (23.1"vis, s/n XX-0F38TH-XXXXX-22J-A6TI, February 2012); HDMI connection
ATA ST31000524AS SCSI Disk Device (1000.20 GB) -- drive 0, s/n 9VPFYM2G, SMART Status: Healthy
 

Jordo141

Honorable
Jul 10, 2012
13
0
10,510


Indeed; I have it a month. I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking it's a faulty card. I got this machine with the sole purpose of being able to run anything on great settings.

If anyone has any other ideas then I'll gladly listen to them.

 
Just one notice: don't mess with the hardware, it's too easy to void the warranty on these machines. That's the reason why I was so quick about telling you to bring it to the warranty service, because if you try doing it yourself, you might end up paying twice.
 

Jordo141

Honorable
Jul 10, 2012
13
0
10,510


Absolutely! As I think I said in the first post, I haven't and have no intentions of overclocking anything. I have no intention of messing about with any of the parts too.
 

Jordo141

Honorable
Jul 10, 2012
13
0
10,510


Yep, uninstalled drivers and ran Driver Sweeper to make sure and I have the latest drivers. Did again when problems persisted.

I'm trying to find out to PSU but I don't have the tools to take the whole chasis apart to see the labels. (The angles to get some of the screws off must need some sort of special tool, I can't get in to them!) :/