Okay, so here's the full story. Make sure you're sitting.
Last summer, I was out shopping at garage sales, and I went and stopped by a house. Seemed normal enough. However, a guy was selling older computer parts. Pretty out of the ordinary. At the time, I was not very knowledgeable in computer hardware, so I bought the EVGA GeForce GTX 570 HD Superclocked he was selling for $15, still in its box, used, but with the ESD bag and everything, minus the driver disc. I thought it was a motherboard (lol) but the guy said it worked, and upon receiving the rest of the parts for my new PC about a week ago, I installed it, and it has been working fine- most of the time.
 
In some games, at random times, the screen will go black and the display will go into power saving mode. Sometimes, this happens with the rest of the PC working (e.g. I can still move/ use voice chat)  but other times the sound will be stuck on loop and the PC freezes, but upon a hard reset everything goes back to normal (unless, of course I start up the game again, and play for a bit).
 
Here's a list of games I haven't had issues with:
 
Cities: Skylines
Peggle
 
These games will crash after a certain amount of playing:
 
Team Fortress 2 (The crash happens faster if I set textures to Very High, which doesn't affect the framerate that much)
Garry's Mod
Minecraft
Lego The Hobbit (I'm pretty sure this is due to this issue, it happened when the second cutscene began)
 
I'll probably test the Sims 3 and 4 as well, but this is the list of games I've tested so far. My games list matches others I've seen, like Cities Skylines being unaffected and TF2 crashing.
 
I have seen people say overvolting to 1025 mV or underclocking the GPU resolves the issue, but I don't want to overvolt until I know for sure it's safe, and if I underclock the GPU I'd lose frames, so I'd rather not (unless I have to, of course). As of now, nothing in my PC has been over/underclocked, and I have not messed with Precision X (which reads 913 mV for voltage).
 
I know this thread is similar to others, but being 2019 and because some of the links there are dead I'd like some help here- hey, for now, at least I can play Cities: Skylines!
 
Of course, here are my specs.
AMD Ryzen 5 2600
MSI A320M Gaming Pro mATX Motherboard
EVGA nVidia GeForce GTX 570 HD Superclocked graphics card (of course)
EVGA 750w PSU
TP-Link AC1300 Dual-Band Wi-Fi adapter model no. Archer T6E
Samsung 500GB 860 EVO M.2 SSD
8GB of RAM
Monitor is a Dell SE198WFP 16:10 with a native resolution of 1440x900, running through DVI.
OS is Windows 10 Pro 64bit.
The driver is the latest NVIDIA driver, 391.35.
 
That's it, minus the mouse and keyboard!
 
Regards, bouncypear

Thanks for responding so fast- I've edited the first post.

Sajin
Underclocking the card is 100% safe.

Oh, yeah, of course, but I'd rather not sacrifice framerate, unless that's the only option I have.

 

Sajin
Well for testing purposes it's best to underclock the card to max negative values on the core & memory to see if that will help fix the problem.

I tested out underclocking the GPU and memory to max negatives, and even with textures on Very High in TF2, there was no crash, and no slowdown as far as I could tell. Hope that helps!

Alright, cool! I'll take Option 1, since I'm still getting great FPS, and for games like Cities: Skylines I can just change to stock clocks. I'm just glad my card is working, I'll upgrade at some point for sure, but I really appreciate your help! I played with the underclocked settings most of my free time today, with no crashes at all. Just amkes me happy I can finally play video games, smoothly lag-free, and without any more issues. It's a huge relief!
 
Okay, I'm done yammering. Once again, thanks for your help (and I really appreciate the timely answers)!

Hey, it's me again!
 
Obviously, the problem has persisted, and I have a few more games that I can categorize below.
 
Working, w/o underclock
Cities: Skylines
The Sims 3 (like 80% sure, the game can be unstable no matter the hardware)
Older PC games (The Sims 2, Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies)
Autodesk Inventor Pro 2018 (this is CAD software)
Terraria
Audiosurf
 
Working, w/ underclock
Team Fortress 2 (as well as every other Source engine game e.g. CS:GO)
The Sims 4 (non-extensive testing)
Minecraft
 
There are some I didn't mention, and that's because I don't know whether or not I was underclocking when I was playing.
I will be adding to this as I test more games, as well.
 
There is an issue, however. Source games (I was playing TF2) crash the drivers when recording with OBS, which is disappointing. I would love to record videos of these games and post them online, so this is something I want to get working.
 
Is it likely that the over-volting solutions shown in other forums are possible as a final solution? I've seen it so much I can't really ignore it.
 
My system specs have not changed, besides the addition of a DVD drive, as well. I should also clarify that my monitor is running at 75hz, and at the time of the original post it was running at 60hz. This change hasn't made any difference to crash frequency.
 
Anyways, thanks!

bcavnaugh
Maybe time to take the card apart Give a Good Clean Out and replace the TIM with some TF8 or MX-4
Or maybe even time to upgrade your Graphics Card.

I might give that a try if I find some free time at work, being under supervision would probably be smart as I haven't done anything like that before. In terms of upgrading, once I scrape up enough cash to do that I probably will.