Sigh, on windows 8.1, driver 350.12. Played for 7 hours yesterday no crash, today crashed multiple times.
 
I also notice the clock speed on my EVGA gtx 980 SC acx 2.0 goes up to 1405MHz. Is this normal?
I looked up the specifications of the card and it says the core clock is 1266MHz, and boost clock should be 1367MHz.
 
It doesn't exactly crash immediately when it goes to 1405MHz, just a speculation. 


 

I'm looking around and I found these reviews:

 

I'm not really sure if any of these apply to me. It's just strange because for 5 months after I built my PC, I don't think I've ever gotten TDRs before. However, I only played League of Legends, CSGO, and Vindictus which weren't games I would play for a straight 7-10 hours; I would switch between them. So TDRs never occured to me. However with BnS, I've been crashing a lot. I've even tried TERA Online and it crashed on there as well so it's not just BnS. 
 
The friend who plays Blade and Soul with me is on windows 10, a MSI gtx 960, on drivers 358.50 (tried that, I got the crashes), he doesn't get any crashes. My cousin has a Reference nvidia gtx 970, windows 10, latest 361.91 driver (tried that as well) and he has no crashes. I'm getting crashes on windows 10 and 8.1 on clean installs.

I searched around a bit more and I found these posts:


 
I indeed tested TERA Online as an alternative game, and the driver did crash after about 40 minutes of playing the game.. And the bottom post is on Blade and Soul, which.. I've been playing too much of. It seems these games might actually not be optimized for higher clock speeds. Maybe this explains why my cousin who has a reference GTX 970 doesn't get crashes since according to Nvidia's specification, the GTX 970 has a base clock of 1050 and boost clock of 1178 which is much lower than the EVGA GTX 980 SC. 
 
It might also explain why I didn't crash after 6+ hrs on The Division (which should utilize the higher core clock since it usually runs at about 70-80% GPU). 
If this is the case, then it's not really a GPU issue, it would be the games, correct?
 
I'm planning on waiting for The Division and try to play that for as long as possible to test whether it crashes. If it doesn't, then it's clearly just Blade and Soul (and TERA) being poorly optimized for higher clock GPUs.

Sajin
No games are specially built to support hardware overclocks. If you have to downclock your card to gain stability it's your gpu and not the game.

What if I am able to run newer/more optimized games such as The Division, CSGO, League of Legends and maybe other single player games fine without an issue. Is it still due to a faulty card that it crashes on old games like TERA (which was initially released 2011) and Blade and Soul (2012) which may or may not handle higher clocked GPUs?