Hello
 
I have been the proud owner of a EVGA GTX 980 SC ACX 2.0 almost five years now and I have had the Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered problem for most of my time I have owned the card. I have tried many of the solutions that have been offered on these forums and on other forums. The display driver crash that I get for whatever reason is not something that pops up consistently but only every once in a while playing mainly in Dota 2 since that is what I play mainly. The driver crash has happened in other games but not as often (if I am unlucky I maybe get one or two display driver crashes while playing any other game than Dota 2 from start to finish.) as in Dota 2. For example I had only one display driver crash while playing Resident Evil 2 remake from start to finish. Also as a side note I am pretty sure that I have heard the GPU max out the fans for maybe a second or two after such a display driver crash but I can't be sure since I wear a headset and it goes away so quickly.
 
What I do know is that the problem should not be my PSU (EVGA Supernova 850w G2) or windows since everytime I have installed windows I do a clean install. I have also done a memtest for my RAM and that was clean also. I have not tried to downclock my GTX 980 yet since I don't like to mess around with the clocks of the GPU (though I am now trying out the debug mode which was suggested as fix). I have also tried to rollback to using older drivers that seemed to be more stable than the current ones that were available at the time of trying to figure out this problem (and I do a clean install of drivers almost everytime) to only have the display driver crash pop up quite quickly.
 
What I was considering was that since I happen to have a extended warranty of five years that would this problem be considered a reason to RMA? Why I haven't done a RMA sooner was because this problem hasn't bothered me that much since it only happens every now and then (the longest time that no problems occurred was 3 months) and I don't have a another GPU to replace the one I am using. But now the problem has flared up again twice in the past few days (the drivers have crashed for total of nine times since the last clean windows install which was in this years january according to windows event viewer) and I checked if I had any warranty left (which I have) and started to consider the RMA option. But since my problem acts like some sort of weird GPU herpes which flares up when I least expect it so I don't know if EVGA will even consider my GPU valid for RMA since I can't for the life of me replicate the display driver crash consistently.
 
Specs:
CPU: Intel i7-4790K
GPU: EVGA GTX 980 SC ACX 2.0
Motherboard: AsRock Z97 Extreme4
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 850w G2
 
So any help or thoughts would be appreciated on this.
 

OS Win 10 ?
 
Any OC on MB, RAM, CPU ? (remove RAM XMP in BIOS & test)
 
Test using different PCIe power cables & spare PSU ports if you have any
 
Try in a different PCIe slot

Not a working fix unless you're fine with it. Sounds like you need to test the card in another known good working system to verify which part is at fault. It's either your psu or gpu. I'm leaning toward gpu.

Ok I today have used the normal clocks on my GTX 980 and I haven't had any crashes what so ever but I am not convinced that that the problems have gone away. Though what windows action center decided to inform me was that I have had 13 Video Hardware errors. When I went to see the action center error dumps I was unable to access them but the files were named something like WD-20190716-something.dmp, sysData.xml and WERInternalMetaData.xml. What was inside those files I have no idea and after exiting the action center report action center decided to promptly remove (or send the errors to Microsoft) said error messages which was super fun.
 
As of right now I have no way to test the GPU in another setup. As for RAM in XMP mode I am assuming that since my BIOS had only two options (Auto and XMP profile) that my RAM (I have Gskill Ares DDR3 1600MHz 4x4GB) has never been in XMP mode since Auto was selected and if I understand XMP mode correctly it's only needed if your motherboard doesn't support higher RAM speeds. I also monitored the temps on my GPU while playing and the temps never rose above 73C while playing Dota 2, Civ 5 and Resident Evil 2 Remake.
 
What I'll do for now is keep using the normal clocks until something happens but since these display driver crashes are totally random I guess I can only hope that EVGA decides to approve my RMA if I decide to take that route.