GTX 580 - Severe Driver Crashes!

GhorMaanas

The Vagrant Seeker
Hello everyone!

i have an MSI N580GTX Lightning, bought in late 2011 (and highly underused, as not played games much on the PC). of-late (since past 2 months or so), am encountering a never-seen-earlier issue with the display. the driver crashes randomly, screen goes blank for 3-4 seconds, then an error pops up saying 'the display driver so-&-so kernel mode crashed & has successfully recovered & blah blah blah blah'. earlier, this was highly infrequent & was very occasional, but with the passage of time, it became worse, and now totally berserk & severe (since past 2 days or so. can't understand how can it be so with time?!)! as soon as i boot up the PC, within minutes, the crash occurs, followed by 3-4 more subsequent crashes, and an ultimate PC restart!

as far as i remember, the last driver on which the GPU was & wherein no such issue occured was i think v285.38/v285.62. i think this started to occur when i updated the driver to v306.97/v310.70. checking up on nvidia forums, i saw heaps of pages where people worldwide have reported about it and are lamenting nvidia for its poor response. some have even suspected nvidia of foul play to force its customers to upgrade to higher series of its GPUs (which, if true, would only hurt nvidia as its customers would instead move onto AMD). but, when i posted this query on another forum, barring one, everyone else who posted there wrote that they don't have any problems what-so-ever!

i have tried clean installations to earlier versions upto v280.26, but to no avail. a person on the nvidia forum wrote that he suspects that the issue lies with probably MS updates not working well with the drivers. most people there report rolling back to v306.97 and the display working fine again then, but there are those like me too who haven't yet seen the light at the end of the tunnel.

a person on the forum also wrote that he faced this issue ever since he bought & installed a new asus GTX 670, and upon inquiring, asus replied that he should considering RMAing the card. should i also write to Mr. Arjun @ MSI regarding this issue, as am afraid i can't seem to understand what to do?! using the desktop now has become practically impossible unless i disable the GPU. please, if someone is facing such an issue and/or has dealt with it successfully, kindly respond here. others as well, please provide some idea on what could be done.

thanks a lot in advance!
 
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GhorMaanas

GhorMaanas

The Vagrant Seeker
i just posted about the issue on MSI's forum. several people have reported this there as well. if it turns out to be of no avail, even my own next step would be towards MSI India's door.

UPDATE: am now on a driver earlier than the notorious v310.70. the PC is now behaving sane, with far less crashes which can be predicted (just after boot-up; watching any flash-based video-content for the 1st time; and after PC is put off 'sleep' mode).
 

asingh

Aspiring Novelist
i just posted about the issue on MSI's forum. several people have reported this there as well. if it turns out to be of no avail, even my own next step would be towards MSI India's door.

UPDATE: am now on a driver earlier than the notorious v310.70. the PC is now behaving sane, with far less crashes which can be predicted (just after boot-up; watching any flash-based video-content for the 1st time; and after PC is put off 'sleep' mode).

There should be zero crashes, unless your thermals our out.
 
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GhorMaanas

GhorMaanas

The Vagrant Seeker
i read that new as well as RMAed units too are suffering, across various brands (on nvidia forums).
yet to get a reply on MSI forum; waiting for it. meanwhile, i think i should write to MSI personnel now.
 

topgear

Super Moderator
Staff member
Ok, do a short test .. boot with a linux Cd - knoppixDVD version try to see some videos, play some small games, try to have fun with Compiz fusion effects and see what happens.
 
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GhorMaanas

GhorMaanas

The Vagrant Seeker
saw your post just now.

but i already performed some stress-tests today for the CPU & GPU (IBT at max. stress for the CPU & MSI Afterburner & Kombustor tests for the GPU). both of them passed those tests satisfactorily. and strangely, very strangley, the system hasn't had any crash/reboot what-so-ever the whole day! :-o :cool:
 

topgear

Super Moderator
Staff member
^^ may be the issue somehow got fixed as it most probably was a software issue.
 
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