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Ok, so November 2013 I bought an MSI 7870 GHZ edition video card. It was a considerable upgrade from my 6850 at the time. Now, I'm getting Driver crashes and sometimes whole system crashes when I'm playing games (FO4), as well as sometimes when I'm just watching videos (youtube/twitch).

I also set my CPU to stock to help figure out what's going on.
My computer is an i5 2500k, Asus p8z68-v LE mb, 16 gb ram, SSD and a couple Hdds, an older Corsair power supply from ~2008.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

Can you take the card out and check out videos or other issues that made your system crash using onboard graphics? That may help.

Also just be sure the fan is still spinning while the system is under load. Could be a dead fan.

good call, that was my next idea. I've also used the driver cleaner utility to wipe my drivers, which didn't seem to help.

I recently had a similar issue with my gtx970. I would get sporadic crashes when playing games or watching movies once every ~2-4 hours. I re-installed drivers, checked for viruses, reverted windows, nothing seemed to help. At first I thought it was my gtx970 since I bought it refurbished from EVGA b stock inventory, but I decided to try a couple of other options before I sent for an RMA.

I had two hard drives that were over 3 years old and I ran some hdtune and chkdsk on both of them. They came back fine. Finally, I got tired of it and re-installed my OS, retiring both of those drives for new shiny intel ssd's. I have not had a problem with crashes since. My gut tells me it was one of my disks failing, but I did also do an in place upgrade to windows 10, could've been OS weirdness.

That's another idea I had. I also did an in-place upgrade from 8.1, so I could do a refresh on my OS. I do have a couple 3-4 year old 1tb HDDs, but my SSD is only 128gb and I can't replace any hardware at the moment.

Sometimes new GPU driver versions will cause system instability. Have you installed driver updates recently? Have you tried reverting back to an older driver?

Yes, I used the Driver Uninstaller to wipe my drivers and installed a version from a couple months ago, and the crashing continued.

Well... I did a clean installation of Windows and haven't been getting driver crashes anymore. Now.... I'm getting memory errors. I ran memtest86 for a couple minutes and had 42(!) errors.

Sounds like a bad DIMM, failing motherboard, or failing memory controller.

Yep, unstable RAM always tends to show up first with crashing GPU drivers. Could be bad RAM or just bad RAM settings, try running your kit at 1333Mhz and verify it's at the right voltage for another pass of memtest. If it still fails you should individually test each module and RMA them if they are still under warranty.

If the card is factory OC'd, it might be worth dropping clocks a few tens of MHz on both the core and memory. Many times as cards age (and drivers improve) the razor-edge factory overclocks tend to surface this way.

But, if you're getting Memtest errors, I'd try either dropping your RAM speed a notch or bumping voltage a bit until it passes. If it never does...RMA time.