Advice on Video Card/Display Issue...

[cohenfive]

I am probably going to need a new video card, but wanted to ask your advice. I have a five year old early core i7 pc running win10 (upgraded from win7), and have ongoing video problems. The video card is the original nvidia geforce gtx 470 1gb card. I get random shutdowns, and the pc then reboots and I get an error message of display driver failure. On occasion the pc will be able to recover and the display reappears, but most of the time the system reboots. I run the auto driver updates, and this has been happening for a while now over more than one driver from nvidia. I'm starting to wonder if this could be hardware and not software. Since the card is so old already, I'd be willing to upgrade cards if that is the only way to stabilize my system. I'd need some advice on what card might work for my now older system that is stable on win10. Thanks!

 

[thesmokingman]

Hw or sw... quickest way to test that is swapping the gpu to confirm with a "known" gpu.

If you can't do that, I would try a full gpu driver cleaning. DL DDU, display driver uninstaller, run it, left it reboot to safemode for you. Wipe yer drivers and install new drivers.

W10 upgrades do not always go cleanly. For ex, doing it on a L720x Dell laptop, it looked fine but... I could not install a new wireless ac card correctly. The bluetooth portion of the card acted dead. I thought it was hw, as there wasn't anything else to it. I was about to return the wan card, till I said screw it and wiped the OS, started from scratch. Guess what? The wireless card works fine on the clean install. TY MS.

 

[TypoFairy©]

I have to second smoking's suggestion of running ddu in safe mode. My 770m really didn't enjoy the upgrade process from win 7->10 and wasn't stable until I ran DDU and reinstalled latest nvidia drivers.

 

[David C]

I fought similar display halts, pauses, freezes, black screens, reboots, messages that display driver had halted, multiple driver installs, etc. for over a year on three different gtx 460, 470 cards in three different computers. Couldn't tolerate the lack of support from nVidia and productivity loss when systems halted so all three cards are now on the shelf collecting dust. I then installed Radeon HD 4850, HD 6850, and 7950 cards (rated per work demands) and haven't had a moments concern since. Also haven't bought any more nVidia based cards at all.

Your time is worth something also, so it may be wise to try a different card before spending as much effort as I did.