I'm having a pretty serious issue with my new hardware and I was hoping that collectively we can find a solution, because I know i'm not the only one. When i'm playing World of Warcraft WOD at 60hz on my new Asus PB287Q monitor, my monitor screen goes black and my computer becomes completely unresponsive. I then have to reboot using the power button on my case, or the reset button, and I hear increased coil whine coming from my 970. This is occurring almost instantly when I select Ultra settings, and happens about an hour after using good settings with antialiasing turned off and vsync enabled, without vsync enabled i'm getting severe tearing. I disabled maxforeground fps, and set the background to 60. 
  My gut instinct is telling me that I need a second 970 SC for SLI, which will arrive tomorrow. I believe one 970 just gets bogged down to easily at such a high resolution. 
 
Here's my system configuration: Intel Core I5 3570k 3.4ghz
                                                16gb Corsair Vengeance ddr3 
                                                EVGA Geforce GTX 970 4GB SC
                                                MSI Z77A-G43 Mobo
                                                Intel 120gb 530 SSD running 8.1 x64 with all updates
                                                latest Nvidia driver
Asus PB287Q display port 1.2 enabled in settings, on game mode, with brightness turned all the way up using the included Displayport 1.2 cable.
 
  Is anyone having similar issues that can possibly chime in. I'm hoping it's just a driver issue, but I think it might possibly be a resource issue.
 
thankyou,
 
Aruul

Sajin-
 
   Using EVGA PrecisionX 16, I reduced the GPU Clock Offset by 101mhz, and then the Mem Clock Offset by 106mhz. So far, I've been playing World of Warcraft for over an hour, which is a vast improvement. I'll have to do some more burn in testing, but I think you may have hit the nail on the head.
  Hopefully a driver update from Nvidia will address this issue. I'm maintaining 60fps using all good settings. I'm scared to bump it up to Ultra because the issue may be resolved. Still, the game is night and day better looking on 4k than 1080p.
  If I can get World of Warcraft to run stable you're my Hero Sir. I'll be upgrading to SLI 970s tomorrow with a new ASRock Mobo, so i'll post an update once everything is built and i've burnt it in a bit.

aruul
Sajin-
 
   Using EVGA PrecisionX 16, I reduced the GPU Clock Offset by 101mhz, and then the Mem Clock Offset by 106mhz. So far, I've been playing World of Warcraft for over an hour, which is a vast improvement. I'll have to do some more burn in testing, but I think you may have hit the nail on the head.
  Hopefully a driver update from Nvidia will address this issue. I'm maintaining 60fps using all good settings. I'm scared to bump it up to Ultra because the issue may be resolved. Still, the game is night and day better looking on 4k than 1080p.
  If I can get World of Warcraft to run stable you're my Hero Sir. I'll be upgrading to SLI 970s tomorrow with a new ASRock Mobo, so i'll post an update once everything is built and i've burnt it in a bit.

Basically if you have to reduce the clocks on a GPU from their default to get stability, the GPU is defective and needs to be replaced. It will not get better and a driver isn't a fix.

aruul

HeavyHemi

aruul
Sajin-
 
   Using EVGA PrecisionX 16, I reduced the GPU Clock Offset by 101mhz, and then the Mem Clock Offset by 106mhz. So far, I've been playing World of Warcraft for over an hour, which is a vast improvement. I'll have to do some more burn in testing, but I think you may have hit the nail on the head.
  Hopefully a driver update from Nvidia will address this issue. I'm maintaining 60fps using all good settings. I'm scared to bump it up to Ultra because the issue may be resolved. Still, the game is night and day better looking on 4k than 1080p.
  If I can get World of Warcraft to run stable you're my Hero Sir. I'll be upgrading to SLI 970s tomorrow with a new ASRock Mobo, so i'll post an update once everything is built and i've burnt it in a bit.

Basically if you have to reduce the clocks on a GPU from their default to get stability, the GPU is defective and needs to be replaced. It will not get better and a driver isn't a fix.

I actually might disagree with this theory because I believe the card is being so overworked @ 4K and my card wasn't doing this at 1080p on an Asus VGA23AH IPS Panel. I can't imagine the load on any video card at 4K screen resolution, so many pixels.

Well, you can disagree. But down clocking increasing stability  is well established as indicative of a weakness in the GPU. It's really no different than a CPU not being able to run stable at a certain clock speed where you either increase the vcore or reduce the clock speed. Others can run at 4K and not experience your issue. You do have a point in that increasing resolution, does use more memory/and or increase GPU work load a bit which might be where your weakness is.  The other issue is, adding another GPU in SLI isn't likely going to resolve your current issue. You didn't tell us your current PSU, but there is some small chance it could be at fault too.

aruul
700 Watt Corsair PSU, sorry I forgot to disclose that.

It's okay. It's pretty common for folks to forget the power supply. Corsair is a good brand and that is more than adequate for a single GPU.

rjohnson11
Do you happen to have a display port 2.0 cable you can try?

  I don't, but I also don't suspect the cable anymore. I've been playing World of Warcraft now this morning for over an hour. I believe downclocking the card like Sajin suggested resolved my issue. Driver issue perhaps? Limitation of hardware? I'm not a computer engineer, nor a coder so I couldn't tell you. What I can say concretely is that downclocking my 970 using the EVGA PrecisionX 16 app seems to have fixed the issue. I'll update the post if this changes. I'll also be building my new system today so i'll give an update on that and see how changing to Ultra in WoW goes, wish me luck. :)

I don't think it's a driver issue, however, if you would like to try all available drivers just to be 105% sure go for it. Downclocking the card helped you gain stability which tells me the card is either unstable at it's default clocks or the card is over boosting itself when playing wow causing instability.

aruul

Sajin
I don't think it's a driver issue, however, if you would like to try all available drivers just to be 105% sure go for it. Downclocking the card helped you gain stability which tells me the card is either unstable at it's default clocks or the card is over boosting itself when playing wow causing instability.

  You're absolutely correct sir, thank you for helping resolve my issue.

No problem. 

aruulI actually might disagree with this theory because I believe the card is being so overworked @ 4K and my card wasn't doing this at 1080p on an Asus VGA23AH IPS Panel. I can't imagine the load on any video card at 4K screen resolution, so many pixels.

 
I don't see how it could meaningfully qualify as a "disagreement". The card is designed to support 4K out-of-the-box, at out-of-the-box frequencies. If your card gets "overworked" under such conditions and causes the system to hang, it immediately means that the card is defective. This is just another way of saying exactly the same thing HeavyHemi was saying.
 
I would disagree with the statements that it cannot be fixed by driver update. A card that's "overworked" is supposed to automatically throttle itself down to prevent such catastrophic consequences as system freeze. If your card behaves badly in this regard, it could be caused by improper card management from the driver's end.