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Back in July I installed some terrible Nvidia drivers which caused periodic system crashes and may have damaged my videocard. Checking the Event Viewer showed that the crashes were associated with nvlddmkm.dll, which I assume is a driver file.

I tried uninstalling the drivers, resulting in a hang during the installation process with my GPU fans spinning like crazy. A reboot and another reinstall of the drivers seemed to fix the issue, and I have since updated to new drivers which supposedly fixed the crashes associated with 320.18. I'm currently running 326.80, but I still get intermittent crashes (screen lockups and BSOD) since then. Event Viewer continues to show that the nvlddmkm.dll service sometimes hangs right when the crash occurs.

So now I'm wondering, are the issues I'm seeing related to ongoing problems with Nvidia's drivers, or is my GPU permanently (but only slightly) damaged? I'm running Win7SP1 and a GTS 450, if that matters.

320.18 were known for various issues (personally I haven't had any): https://forums.geforce.com/default/topi ... 5-23-13-/1
There are a few reports of people damaging their cards when using this version, most likely their cards were already defective and these drivers have exposed these defects. I am not sure if your card was also affected - you won't know for sure unless you replace it with the same one...

Also, the latest WHQL version is 327.23, try these.

JohnC wrote:

320.18 were known for various issues (personally I haven't had any): https://forums.geforce.com/default/topi ... 5-23-13-/1
There are a few reports of people damaging their cards when using this version.

Uh, yeah, I already knew that. In fact, I linked an article about that.

Also, the latest WHQL version is 327.23, try these.

I'll try that, thanks.

As an FYI, I had the similar issues.. updating to the latest drivers seems to have helped.. (I'm using the GeForce Experience tool, or whatever it's called).

Yes, I saw the reboots due to the 320.18 drivers on my 650TI. It would happen just about every few days (though sometimes more often.) Since I upgraded to the latest WHQL drivers I'm not seeing the crashes. It annoyed me to no end because the old AMD drivers/card I was using was good at recovering from crashes of the video driver without taking the system down, unlike the 320.18 drivers which always took the system down when the video driver stopped responding.

It was really strange... my system would lock up... eventually I reinstalled the drivers, which would then throw TDR's for the first few times (usually if a browser was open), and then lock up later. Only when I was able to update to the latest (as of last week), the situation resolved itself...

argh I updated to the latest WHQL drivers and it's still happening

Try 314.22 WHQL. Those are the newest drivers that are stable for me.

Oh Jebus. I've been running 320.49 since forever. 327.23 came out, gave me constant machine check exception BSODs. I tried tons of things before finally reverting to 320.49 and everything has been good since. Now I'm wondering if 320.49 has the problems that 320.18 does. Anyone know? I can't imagine WHQL drivers with hardware-burning problems.

Yes it does. The 320s were the newest when my 660 showed up. I couldn't believe NV had this issue after hearing for years how great their drivers are.

I haven't had issues with anything past 320.49 that I recall.