“Display driver stopped responding and has recovered” error.

To respond to this, in my 20 years of experience with PC, and all other computing platforms on the planet, but mainly building and maintaining PC's, I have NEVER, EVER heard that having a PS with a higher wattage than the system needs is a cause for ANY problem.  If the system doesn't use the Wattage, again, I've never heard of any problem relating to this, nor have I ever had a problem with a PC using a PS that has more wattage than it needs.  I currently have 9 computers in my home.  Several have PS's that have much more power that the system can use, and this keep up with future upgrades, which several of these machines have had.

Currently, I have an 850W Corsair, 4 SSD's, and 4 standard HD's.  My PS is being put to good use in my main system.

My problem only started when I replaced my boot SSD with the new Samsung 840, replacing the Samsung 830, which is still in the system.  I did remove an older Vertex 3 after swapping boot drives.

I have tried every step I've read about, tried my own steps to fix the problem, and NOTHING has worked.  I even know the voltage levels from my PSU are well within tolerance levels.

I have the same problem, but I have an NVidia 660 TX.

I've had the card for about 6 months, and then after I installed a new boot SSD (Samsung 840, to replace my Samsung 830), removed an older one, that's when the problem started.

I have 4 standard HD's in my system, and 4 SSDs.

The problem never happens in games, I know the card is not overheating (using tools to read the temperature), etc, and only really occurs when the system is completely idle, sitting at the desktop.

Sometimes it happens every 3 mins, other times it takes a day to show up.  It usually happens when the system is idle, and then I move the mouse, then boom, the video card drivers crashes and recovers.

Here is what I've tried so far, from my own experience (I've built at least 15 PC myself over the past 15 years, and currently own and maintain 8 PCs), not counting those at work, and other suggestions on the net, EVGA tech support, etc.

BTW, NONE of these steps have solved this problem

1. I have removed my video card, used compressed air to clean the dust out of it, cleaned out the PCI slot with alcohol to remove any dust from the contacts, and reseated it, and did the same for the power connections running to the card.
2. I have tried the MS fix based on the timeout value, both using the MrFixit tool, and by modding the registry settings manually, following the KB steps.
3. I have removed all video card drivers, reverted back to the MS VGA drivers, made sure there were not remnants of the old drivers, and did a clean install of the new drivers.
4. I removed, and disabled the NVidia HD Audio driver (I don't use it anyway), suggested by EVGA support
5. Tried to raise the video card voltage (idle voltage) a little, and this seemed to work for a day or two, then the problem appeared again.
6. I checked the +12v in the bios, and it's within tolerance, so my power supply should not be part of the problem.

There have been other steps that I can't remember.

I still have this problem, and it's driving me crazy.

Out of all the forum posts on different sites I've found, there are very few answers, and 95% of the posts are people reporting this problem.  There are posts *everywhere* on this problem.

I would love to know how to solve it.

I haven't tried removing the new SSD from the system yet, as that's when the problem began, but that would require a ghosting the SSD to another SSD, removing the new SSD, and booting with that.  The new SSD is my boot drive, so that's a long and painful process.

No solution, or fix,  but a couple of observations -

If your 650W power supply was a good quality it would have been more than enough for

a  GT 640 .  Too much actually. The GT 640 only requires a minimum of 350W.

A 400/420 W quality power supply would allow plenty of headroom.

What you have now, assuming the power supply is a good quality one and actually does produce

900W,  is far too much available power.

• A power supply operates most efficiently from 50- about 80% of it's capacity.

When it runs below 50% is starts drawing more power and creates more heat. The same is

true at the other end of the scale.

Your system would barely be using 50% of a 650W psu under full load. When not playing games

or otherwise stressing the full system it would be running well below 50% capacity.

Regarding cheap power supplies vs quality power supplies.

Cheap power supplies tend not to deliver stable voltage. It takes very little change to cause a

cpu or gpu to lag, and lag is what the TDR is all about.

So, in some cases TDR can be a result of power instability.

The fluctuations do not just come from inadequate power, they also come from cheap capacitors,

coils and other voltage regulating components.

Windows 32bit vs 64bit is very unlikely to be a source of TDR. 

If you have 4GB or more RAM you need a 64bit OS to make use of all the RAM.

A 32bit OS can only access around 3.25GB total memory, including graphics card VRAM.

• While the GT640 comes with 2GB VRAM, is would struggle to process more than 1GB data, so

if you are running a 32bit OS, and graphics is using 1GB VRAM you should still be fine.

The only way you would have a problem is if you had a lot of other large files open when

running the game which may push the total RAM past the limits of the 32bit OS. This should not

be done in any case when playing a game, as it will lower the performance of the graphics card

on relation to system RAM requirements for the game

.

"Windows 7's power saving settings reduce the voltage to the video card too much when it's idle.

Many 3D cards require a minimum voltage to be stable, but when "idle", they are basically asleep so everything should be ok.

However, now that so many apps are "hardware or video accelerated" (like Flash, Quicktime, Java, Firefox 4, IE9), the video card is being used when it's in "idle mode" and under-voltage.

The only way to fix this is to tweak advanced settings using 3rd party tools (and possibly fry the video card), or wait for MS to patch this, if ever. "

I'm having the same problems with one pc with an Nvidia GeForce GT 640 - all drivers are fully up to date.  I did suspect that it was power fluctuations causing the issue. I rebuilt the computer from scratch reinstalling Windows 7 (32bit) with fully up to date drivers etc. I even upgraded the PSU from a 650watt one to a 900watt one just in case the problem lied there - but this made no difference.

I've come to the same conclusion that it is a Win 7 power management issue and one that unfortunately cannot be solved by changing the advanced Power Options settings.

I haven't yet found a solution, neither have I found third party tools that can fix this - so suggestions are very welcome.  My next step is upgrading the pc to Windows 7 64bit... fingers crossed.