Nvidia 740M intermittently not working

[studdles]

I have been having an interesting issue with my Geforce GT 740m for the past few months. The card will work fine, then after playing a game or watching movies for a few hours (things that use the dedicated graphics over the intel integrated), the game will crash and I'll get a driver error in the taskbar. Sometimes this is followed by a BSOD. After this point, the card seems to disappear, it can not be used, detected by any software including Nvidia's software or GPU-z, and becomes hidden in device manager.

Once it has done this, it's completely random as to when it reappears, could be hours, days. What usually happens is after hibernating, when I turn the laptop back on, rather than restoring the laptop will startup as if from being shut down, then I check and the GPU is back. Whilst it's working, I notice no tearing or performance issues.

I suspect there's a fault with the card itself, though am hoping someone may have some sort of solution. I have tried updating/restoring drivers, system restores and have reinstalled windows, but to no real avail. Unfortunately this started happening just out of warranty (probably only a few weeks out, typical!), so I'm hoping someone may have some ideas.

Thanks in advance.

I'd be happy to provide any more info that may be of help.

 

[rockie_]

Avoid overheating of the card . Underclock it , if needed . Also use a cooling pad .

 

[studdles]

Avoid overheating of the card . Underclock it , if needed . Also use a cooling pad .

Thanks for the suggestion, Just tried underclocking it (by the max allowable in MSI afterburner which wasn't a huge amount, something like 90ish core and 130ish memory), but the problem happened again. the GPUz log showed temperature didn't get over 67 degrees. Clock settings when it crashed were 927.6 core 810.0 mem VDDC 1.1750v

 

[rockie_]

i guessed it was overheating . Is it true ? If yes , then try underclocking . Otherwise , dont do any tweaking .

 

[studdles]

i guessed it was overheating . Is it true ? If yes , then try underclocking . Otherwise , dont do any tweaking .

No, it's not overheating. I wonder if it could be a problem with the memory? I notice that when I run the render test in GPUz, there's no issues, but it also uses none of the dedicated GPU memory. As soon as I run a game it starts using the dedicated memory and that's when the crashes happen.