Hey guys, just to tell you i just did a cross ship RMA and the card is working 100% no more black screen crash.
 
Now i need to see if they will refund when they receive my defect one.

I had the same issues with Skyrim and Unigine on 970 SC ACX 2.0....  Black screen, looping sound and had to cold reboot my PC to get the screen to come back again.
I've RMA'd the card and should have a new one back within the next few days.
I get the feeling that the factory overclocks on these cards were too much for a certain batch of GPUs. The GPUs are probably perfectly fine when running at Nvidia reference speeds.

RMA process has been great so far though, very pleased with the super quick service 

Just opened a support ticket today.  Been having similar issues with black screen/driver stopped responding and recovered while playing Witcher 3 and World of Warcraft.  Also Valley benchmark locks my computer up after awhile resulting in me having to hard reset.  Have read many posts that say it could be a PSU issue but since my last card AMD/ATI 5850 used 6 watts more then the 970 according to HWcompare.com I find it hard to believe that its the problem. My temps seem fine, hottest I have seen the card get is 75c which is a safe operating temp. The card also seems to have the latest bios 84.04.36.00.70. 
 
CPU - AMD Phenom 6 core 1055t 2.8ghz
Motherboard - ASUS M4A87TD-EVO
Memory - Crucial Ballistix Tactical 8GB (2 x 4GB) 1333
PSU - Thermaltake 850w TR2 RX-850 AP

Hello fellow EVGA community! 
I might be new on the forums (and this is likely to be my only post, but it's important I make it because it could help others) I have been using EVGA products for quite a few years (along with Gigabyte), so when I personally encountered this problem I was a bit miffed but today I made my RMA claim on a EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB SC ACX 2.0
 
I was finally able to reproduce the dreaded *black screen of death reliably, it had happened occasionally before every now and then in FarCry 4 (But never CS:GO or DotA2) and WoW gave me a BSoD or two that resulted in minidumps that blamed NVIDIA drivers.  
 
*Black screen of death = both monitors go no input, sound loops or continues, requires hard reset, one attempt even made my UEFI go to default settings because it ****ed with CMOS/POST apparently, fun times, MSI Gaming 5 Z97/i5 4670K (no overclocking ever)
 
I gotta admit I didn't run any of the benchmarks on my card, or tried to OC, and I thought I was fine because you know, it's an EVGA product, but in Witcher 3 I came to a point I couldn't progress anymore because this would happen at the same place roughly every single time, that is, until I downclocked the card using EVGA Precision today.
 
So apparently it can't run the default shipped stock settings on the card, and that's a RMA claim right there.
 
You can download a .rar with my witcher 3 saves , you can nab it and try (extract to Documents\The Witcher 3\gamesaves\, ver 1.06) , it's a part of the main quest, if you can kill the foglets and progress the quest your card may be fine, my card couldn't do it until I severely underclocked my card.
 
If I remember I'll update this thread on my own RMA and what became of it.
 
EDIT: I think new users can't posts links, but the saves are at ht.tps://aftonpravdan.nu/inet/w3s .rar (Remove the dot and space, sorry, mods/community feel free to verify if makes anyone feel safer)

squeets
Is there any chance EVGA would let me give them my payment information and cross ship a new GPU without charging me?  But have the charge looming if they don't get my GPU in return?  Like if within "x" amount of time if they don't get my card back they will charge me?
 
I just bought my 970 a little over a month ago and I am having these black screen issues (even after exchanging the card for a new one at Microcenter a few weeks after getting it), but I don't have enough money for them to charge me the price of an entire other GPU during the RMA process... And I don't have another GPU to use in the interim for the weeks the back and forth would take to get the replacement?
 
I understand their need to protect themselves with the charge so people don't get the RMA replacement for free and then send nothing back... But don't they have some customer loyalty kind of thing?  Can't they look in my account and see I have thousands of dollars in EVGA parts registered over the years and I am a loyal customer and have no interest in stealing?
 
Thanks

Regardless of whether they hold on to the charge or actually charge you, the money will be set aside by the creditor, just for pinging the transaction. Only difference is a pending charge drops off after about a week or so.
 
 
Anyway, moving on..
 
I just wanted to stop by and mention that the bout of black screens everyone is experiencing may actually be driver related. I was experiencing constant display driver crashes (black screen on several titles, just like everybody else). A temporary fix that seemed to work well with my rig was limiting Witcher 3 gameplay to 30FPS; since it dropped the workload of the GPU by ~40%, I came to the assumption that my card was faulty..
 
Well, just this past weekend, I decided to give Windows 10 a go(I learned that M$ will be converting technical preview versions of the OS into a retail copy of Pro when the preview expires). Got most of my programs and games loaded to the OS and thought to give Witcher 3 a try again..
Wouldnt you know it, the game has been nothing but butter smooth ever since, without crashes! I've logged about 12 hours this weekend(mainly screwing around, trying to replicate a display crash), and the game plays contently at the 60FPS lock (GPU pegged at 99% util); keep in mind, under Windows 7, the game would routinely crash five minutes in if the card sustained full utilization.
 
*Knocks on wood*
From my end, at least, the black screen issue appears to just be driver related(possibly too many past drivers overlapping each other). I'll post a follow up if I end up running into issues again

I am currently getting issues now with project cars, seems one problem after another with this 970.
 
Stock clocks, voltages.  The game is every so often going to blank screen with sound still going.  Its only ever doing it in menus etc. not when card at full stress.
 
I alt-tab to desktop, kill game and relaunch to carry on, I cannot switch back to game after alt tabbing it has to be killed.
 
I wish now I did the step-up I started early this year.

MightionNY
Hmmm... this sounds exactly like the issues I have playing Skyrim at stock (factory-overclocked) speeds on my brand-new GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0 playing Skyrim - black screen crash requiring hard shutdown.  Longest I played without a crash at stock speeds was 13 mins.  Used Precision to clock it -114 mhz and Skyrim hasn't crashed since.  This is a brand-new system I built, running 353.38.
 
I had no trouble with anything else though - it even ran through the 3DMark primary tests with an "accidental" .5 ghz CPU overclock at factory overclocked speeds.  Ran the Arkham Knight benchmark twice with everything set to the max (1080i res, though); no crash.  Maybe tonight I'll try actually playing the game at stock speeds....
 
Maybe I'll give EVGA one shot at the RMA apple.... they didn't answer me as to what I'm supposed to do with the backplate, though.

I'd definitely get it RMA'd. Since I had mine replaced, it's been working flawlessly.

aleki
I just wanted to stop by and mention that the bout of black screens everyone is experiencing may actually be driver related. I was experiencing constant display driver crashes (black screen on several titles, just like everybody else). A temporary fix that seemed to work well with my rig was limiting Witcher 3 gameplay to 30FPS; since it dropped the workload of the GPU by ~40%, I came to the assumption that my card was faulty..
 
Well, just this past weekend, I decided to give Windows 10 a go(I learned that M$ will be converting technical preview versions of the OS into a retail copy of Pro when the preview expires). Got most of my programs and games loaded to the OS and thought to give Witcher 3 a try again..
Wouldnt you know it, the game has been nothing but butter smooth ever since, without crashes! I've logged about 12 hours this weekend(mainly screwing around, trying to replicate a display crash), and the game plays contently at the 60FPS lock (GPU pegged at 99% util); keep in mind, under Windows 7, the game would routinely crash five minutes in if the card sustained full utilization.
 
*Knocks on wood*
From my end, at least, the black screen issue appears to just be driver related(possibly too many past drivers overlapping each other). I'll post a follow up if I end up running into issues again

Well, looks like I'm eating my words.. Have been having some pretty consistent crashes for almost two weeks, so looks like an RMA is in order. Sucks.. such a nice card when it works :(
 
PS: Tried all hotfixes w/ clean install

wrcromartie
I just want to add my voice here - I have a EVGA GTX 970 SC ACX 2.0....I am also having black screen crashes that lead to an immediate hard reset of my PC in the witcher 3, rocket league, and occasionally the total war games. 
 
Unfortunately the usual symptom here is an immediate power cut & reboot, not even leaving a minidump file for me to check out. In witcher 3 it usually occurs on-loading of the actual save game and in rocket league it usually occurs when loading the main menu. 
 
One short term fix I have figured out is underclocking the card in PrecisionX - usually this is able to stave off any hard resets for a while. (I'm using -418mhz on gpu clock and -201mhz on mem clock but haven't really tried to 'optimize' much). 
 
I have now RMA'd my card two times. What is weird is that the RMA seemed to fix issues for a few weeks, only for them to return in full force now. I may be trying out another (3rd) RMA after I try swapping out the PSU. 

Personally, it sounds like your issue is due to a misbehaving PSU. Typically, any sort of hardware crash gets logged in event viewer, so long as the OS has access to the Storage, and CPU. A hard cycle typically indicates Immediate instability to a critical component; which could either be poor power delivery by the Motherboard, or poor output from PSU. 
GPU issues manifest themselves in display driver errors and black screens; which are both logged in event viewer. Others are artifacts on screen(VRAM), or anomalies affecting the display.
RAM and CPU issues can manifest in Blue Screen of Death, hardlock/screen freeze, or looping audio
Storage failures are eerie. Usually the system will function, up until it has to call on an integral file not preloaded to RAM; followed by a hard-crash.
 
What I've noticed with newer nVidia architecture, is that doesnt apply a linear load to the PSU; perhaps new cards are powerful enough where they dont float at high utilization like my previous cards.. Regardless, this can stress a tightly dialed system, since power delivery will shift the output of a PSU undergoing varying workloads..
 
Anyway, if you dont mind my asking, what are you using for a PSU?

Just throwing in my experience here. I had this issue with my GTX 970 SC for months, tried to resolve it by underclocking, changing settings in games etc. It seemed that certain settings or specific effects in games seemed to cause it to happen (like whenever an objective was captured in Heroes of the Storm, or a very specific monster in Dragon Age: Inquisition). I got an RMA for my card (since I saw threads like this) perhaps back in May. Pulled out my old card, put in the RMA card and.... got the black screen shortly thereafter with the new card. So I thought, well, let's just try out SLI now that I have two cards. I was so enamored with the performance boost that I just decided to keep the second card, figuring that since my RMA'ed card was doing it too, it wasn't a hardware issue and I'd figure out a resolution at some point.
 
It had stopped for a while, but is now doing it in Final Fantasy 14 pretty reliably when I run it in DirectX 11, but not in DirectX 9. And it doesn't do it at all in the Witcher 3, which I have set to all Ultra, and runs both my SLI'ed cards at 90% the whole time. For me it doesn't seem like the amount the cards is being worked has anything to do with whether or not it freezes. I downloaded Sattelite Reign, a little top down indie game, and it froze. My experience seems to be, as I said, that certain effects (in my experience it seems like lighting or particle effects) cause it to happen. This would make sense why DirectX 9 would not have the issue with DirectX 11 would, since 11 allows for a lot more lighting effects.
 
I'd try the 70% fan solution, but that just doesn't seem sustainable, as it makes my computer sound like a jet engine, and it seems like a more properly functioning auto-fan should do the same thing more effectively. I've tried underclocking my cards to stock speeds nad it does help, but not 100%. Considering EVERY thread I see about this issue, seems to be with this particular card (GTX 970 SC), it seems like just a really significant faulty run that is really common. I'd RMA them again, but my experience with my first RMA didn't go so well. I would swap these cards out for stock non-OC cards in a minute, since they seem much more stable... do you think EVGA would do that for me if I told them my situation?

Some further experience. I finally found an experience that could quickly and consistently create a crash for me, so I could do some testing. The Star Wars Battlefield beta (running on all high settings) was causing my comp to crash a few minutes in every time. I set up GPU-Z to track the sensors on my card every second to a log and see what was happening. It wasn't obvious what was happening exactly before the crash, but one pattern emerged. As others have said, the card was getting around 80c and the TDP % was hovering around 100, or even jumping up to 103% at times. After doing some research, I realized this is "Thermal Design Power" and generally refers to the manufacturer saying how much power can safely go through your card. The fact that it was going to 103% percent was interesting to me. I was also shocked to see that even at 80c, the fans were only running at 50%.
 
So, I did a few things. First of all, I realized I had SLI disabled, so I enabled it. I also did one other I think key thing that others here have mentioned. I downloaded EVGA Precision, and enabled the built in fan curve, which is much more aggressive, going to 50% fan at around 50c and upwards from there. I also set the max power at 100% for both cards. I then went back into the game and set everything to Ultra.
 
I played three full 10 minute matches of Battlefield with no crashes. GPU-Z showed the temperature never got above 69c, and the TDP never hit 100%.
 
So here's my hypothesis. For these OC cards, they set the power and heat allowances up higher, and slap a better heatsink on it. They do their own testing, but they can't test against our specific computer setups (how much heat we have in our systems, running in SLI etc). So even if it can last at full load in their setups, it might get to an unstable level of heat/power draw in ours. I'm a bit shocked by how conservative the default fan curve is to be running at 50% at 80c, which seems a bit hot to me.
 
For me, so far, this combination of upping the fan curve and putting a hard cap on the power draw through Precision if not fixing the issue, seems to greatly help. When I complained most recently to EVGA and asked for a non-OC card, they said they couldn't do that, but they could RMA me another and make sure to note to the testers to be very thorough in their testing. I'm thinking this isn't so much a "manufacturing" flaw with these OC cards so much as, they are OC'ed and are inherently more unstable, and thus it's up to the testing team to ensure that the level of OC and cooling etc is stable, and for the ones we've been getting, combined with our comp setups (airflow etc), may push the OC cards over the edge.
 
I personally bought a factory OC card because I didn't want to deal with the trouble of making sure my manual OC was stable, but I guess that's what I'm doing. Since I'm not going for bleeding edge performance, but just a little boost, increasing the fans and putting a cap on the power draw is well worth the trade off of stability.
 
I'll keep you all updated with if this seems to fix it across other games, but since Battlefield was crashing so aggressively, and now is stable, I'm hoping it will be a trend.

Morphe42
Ok. I have some very interesting results from the Unigine tests.
 
The Valley test runs completely fine at Ultra with 8xAA. I let the cinematic run for like 10 minutes, did the benchmark, and also ran around in walk and free fly mode for a while. All beautiful with no issues, no crashes.
 
The Heaven test crashes (same crash as in Skyrim, black display crash) at around the 4 or 5th scene (scenes of the hover boat ship). BUT this only occurs when I have tessellation set to EXTREME. I tried it out with tessellation OFF, ran through all scenes just fine, and did the free move for a while no problems. Tried it with tessellation set to Normal, and that also went through the scenes no problem.
 
Weird thing is, after doing some searching it doesn't seem like Skyrim implements tessellation. Skyrim is a DirectX 9 game, and doesn't have tessellation. So I don't really know if these 2 things are linked or not.
 
If anyone else with a EVGA GTX 970 reads this thread - could you try running the Unigine Heaven test with settings to Ultra, Tessellation set to Extreme, (I'm running at 1920x1080 resolution), and let me know if your card handles it? I'm really interested to know if this is a specific hardware issue with just my card - or an issue with nvidia drivers.
 
What do you guys think? Is crashing in the Unigine Heaven pretty bad (even though tessellation is set to Extreme) - does it seem like driver issue or hardware issue? I just built this PC and this is the first time I've really doled out this much money for a higher-end graphics card, and I'm kind of disappointed about this crashing. I can RMA if need be.

This is mine exactly. It's fine in all benchmarking software except it crashes at that exact point in Heaven with Tessellation set to Extreme. I don't play Skyrim, but mine crashes in Battlefield 4 and sometimes Rome II and Assassin's Creed. Is RMA the only option? 

Also been having this issue with my 970 SC. About to have to go through the RMA after only having it since October. I really hope this isn't a regular thing.

Same here with my 980 SC.  RMA in progress.  Very frustrating.

Another good game to test stability is Alice Madness Returns. Get it from Origin though, Steam's version is broken and you cannot finish the game unfortunately.