Problem with graphics card

Hi all,

Thanks for taking a look at helping me out here. I have a perhaps unusual problem with my computer that seems to stem from my graphics card. What happens is that periodically, either when I do certain things like watch a YouTube video full-screen or at seemingly complete random, the screen glitches badly and either the computer crashes and restarts, or it goes black for a moment then comes back on, with the message that my graphics card encountered an error and recovered. Sometimes the glitch will occur multiple times in quick succession, recover each time, and then finally glitch again and crash, sometimes it will stabilise and I won't hear of it again for a while. The glitches are entirely unpredictable, sometimes they won't occur for hours or even days, other times they happen constantly all day for hours, and there's never anything I can do about them except hope that they don't happen.

Hopefully someone will have some idea of what the problem is because I'm clueless.

Here are my specs,
Windows 7 Professional 32-bit SP1
AMD Athlon II X3 445
4.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz (9-12-12-30)
ASRock M3A770DE (CPUSocket)
768MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460
298GB SAMSUNG HD322GJ ATA Device (SATA)

Thanks

 

When was the last time you updated your video driver ? Does your NVIDIA GeForce card have a fan on it ? Check the fan to see if it is spinning !!!!
You might have to replace the card...

 

It has a fan and the fan is currently working fine.

I didn't even think of updating my driver. Before update to 320 just now I was using 314. But surely this problem couldn't be just due to the driver?

 

It could be a driver Issue, But sounds more like a Heat issue..

 

Is there any way to narrow down the cause?

Voltages from BIOS: 1.38V, 3.296V, 5.064V, 12.196V

Compared with image below, which is about 0.7V higher, nearly at 13V. Looking at HWMonitor at this moment, I'm sitting at around 12.9V.

Normally crash occurs after just a few minutes of either full-screen YouTube or full-screen videogame. Even 1080p windowed LoL will cause a crash after less than 3 minutes.

Correction: I just attempted to force my computer to crash so I could capture voltage and temp but even in playing 1080 and full-screen for several minutes it didn't crash or glitch at all... Strange. However as I was opening Firefox after exiting the game, it glitched slightly for a moment. (But didn't crash, and hasn't glitched since.) I didn't notice any changes in min/max on HWM... This is just becoming more confusing. Maybe the problem was exacerbated before due to the lack of update on the driver? Or maybe it's just more randomly unstable than I thought?

 

Can you test that card in another computer ? Sounds like the card is just starting to go out ..

 

Will do. How long are cards expected to last? This one has only been in use for two years and it's not been used very heavily. Also the problem started occurring nearly a year ago, so it was only a year before it started having problems.

 

The Card time life all comes down to the Maker, and where it was made at .. Nvidia is a good brand, but I have seen them go out in less than a year...