A week or two ago, my Gigabyte GTS 450 died, and I bought a new EVGA GTX 650 from newegg. When I switched video cards, I also updated the drivers from 306.97 to 310.90. Ever since installing the new video card, I've been getting intermittent "crashes"; usually while browsing reddit or some other mundane activity. I put crashes in quotes as I'm not getting any error codes, my machine -which had been extremely stable previous to this- simply shuts down. It's as if someone had flipped the power switch; leaving nothing in the event log except an entry marking an unexpected shutdown.
It's odd to me that this occurs only while the GPU is NOT under load. I can play LoL just fine, and even newer more taxing games like Diablo 3 or Borderlands 2. The main correlation I've found with the crashes is when I'm downloading something; sometimes an image on imgur or buffering a youtube video. Normal net traffic such as chatting on mumble with friends or watching a video stream don't seem to trigger a crash. I've found I can pretty consistently cause a crash by attempting to download a game from Steam. I'm unsure how these types of net traffic differ such that one causes a crash and another doesn't.
However these crashes don't happen in safe mode, or if I disable my video card drivers. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the video drivers or perhaps some other system component. I'm assuming it's the video drivers as removing them seems to stop the problem. I've tried rolling back to older drivers, such as 306.97 or even further back to 306.23 (the oldest driver I could find from nVidia). All to no avail.
At the moment I'll try to live with intermittent restarts using driver 310.90 and see if switching back to my GTS 450 helps when it's back from being repaired in a week or two. Let me know if there's any other information I can gather that would be helpful. Or any suggestions on a fix would be greatly appreciated.
I've posted this same thread on the nVidia forums where someone then asked about my Network Card/drivers. My network card is listed as 'Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller' it's integrated with my motherboard. The driver I'm using is 7.65.1025.2012 released on 10/25/2012. Unfortunately updating this hasn't changed the crashes at all.
I'm unsure if it's helpful, but just in the interest of information, I'm connected through a Linksys E3000 router, using firmware ver 1.0.04. Modem is an SB6121 and my ISP is Comcast.
It's odd to me that this occurs only while the GPU is NOT under load. I can play LoL just fine, and even newer more taxing games like Diablo 3 or Borderlands 2. The main correlation I've found with the crashes is when I'm downloading something; sometimes an image on imgur or buffering a youtube video. Normal net traffic such as chatting on mumble with friends or watching a video stream don't seem to trigger a crash. I've found I can pretty consistently cause a crash by attempting to download a game from Steam. I'm unsure how these types of net traffic differ such that one causes a crash and another doesn't.
However these crashes don't happen in safe mode, or if I disable my video card drivers. I'm not sure if this is a problem with the video drivers or perhaps some other system component. I'm assuming it's the video drivers as removing them seems to stop the problem. I've tried rolling back to older drivers, such as 306.97 or even further back to 306.23 (the oldest driver I could find from nVidia). All to no avail.
At the moment I'll try to live with intermittent restarts using driver 310.90 and see if switching back to my GTS 450 helps when it's back from being repaired in a week or two. Let me know if there's any other information I can gather that would be helpful. Or any suggestions on a fix would be greatly appreciated.
I've posted this same thread on the nVidia forums where someone then asked about my Network Card/drivers. My network card is listed as 'Realtek PCIe GBE Family Controller' it's integrated with my motherboard. The driver I'm using is 7.65.1025.2012 released on 10/25/2012. Unfortunately updating this hasn't changed the crashes at all.
I'm unsure if it's helpful, but just in the interest of information, I'm connected through a Linksys E3000 router, using firmware ver 1.0.04. Modem is an SB6121 and my ISP is Comcast.