I read somewhere that people are resolving their issue with disabling physx or setting it to the CPU instead of the GPU. I have not tested this but I can give it a shot. There is definitely an issue with this card or drivers.. something is not right.

More testing with different games and it seems that as long as I keep the card at 70c or below everything is fine. I do not need to keep the fans ramped up, I just need the card to sit at 70 or below. I can accomplish this at 30-40% fanspeed. (while gaming)

I have not had a single issue since realizing this.
Phenom II x4 @ 3.5
8gb of RAM
GTX 970sc Evga
SSD
850w modular psu

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.

I had the same issue and the fan curve fixed it for me. Nice post :-)

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? 

Morphe42
2) Using the DVI-I (with VGA adapter) out, the graphics card puts out noticable RF interference when the graphics card is under heavy use (gameplay). My main monitor is HDMI, and secondary monitor is the analog signal. When I start playing a game, the second monitor starts getting the horizontal waves/ripples going up and down the screen indicative of RF interference in the signal. I need to try a new VGA cable here to see if maybe the cable just isn't shielding well (could very well just be a cable issue here with bad shielding). I guess it could also be the power supply (also an EVGA product) producing the RF interference, as it would be doing its stuff when the graphics card is working more. Not really faulting the card here, as RF interference is something to deal with when using analog signal, but alas my current setup requires analog signal for a secondary monitor. 

I also experience this RF interference on my second (analog) display using DVI to VGA adapter. 

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.

RMA request submitted I will report back on if this fixes my issue.

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

Hi, friends.
I'm from brazil, sorry my bad english.

I have the EVGA 970 SC 2.0 ACX and i have experienced the black screen when playing The Witcher 3. My TV lose the signal but the computer still working, so i have to do the hard reset and i am afraid something worse happens to my pc.
When i bought the VGA i received two games (The Witcher 3 and Batman Arkhan Knight), Batman works fine, but i didnt played a lot, i liked more the witcher 3.
I also played GTA V online for hours and nothing happens, but the witcher now in the end of the game it's unpllayable. Always the same black screen of death.
Since the beggining till the end of the game i has only 3 crashes, but now in the final battle, it's impossible. I'm so sad. :(

I don't know what to do, like i sayd, i live in brazil, can i get a RMA from the jungle i live? lol
But i'm afraid of the rma too, read this forum i saw some friends have to do 2 or 3 rma to fix the issue.

Thanks, have a great week.


Edit: Hey, i went home for lunch and try to play a while, i did one thing that i saw here before play: I limited the witcher 3 at 30fps and i played the final battle and had no problem, but it's lunch time, just one hour, so i can play about 20~30 minutes. I don't know if this solved the problem.
 
Other question: I saw that so many people have problems with Witcher 3 and Metro. I want to test other games that crash to black screen, but skyrim. Any sugestions?

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.