BSOD PC Randomly Reset/Shutdown

Few weeks (after Intel spectre announcement and windows update) ago my system started randomly restarting and shutting down (cutting off) so I reinstalled windows and everything was fine until a week back, where it started resetting again and more frequently. Sometimes the monitors cut off and pc is running and I have to hard reset. Sometimes it resets on its own. Sometimes it just cuts off. I noticed that some of the SATA ports on my motherboard stopped working and will at times randomly detect/not detect my HDD.

It restarts randomly, sometimes when I'm playing games and sometimes when nothing is running at all.
The PC is over 4 years old (GPU 3 years) and I hope its not a motherboard/PSU/GPU issue as warranty has passed.

Note that I sometimes run my PC for extended periods of time and it works fine, but it suddenly resets and once it does it resets quite frequently

I do not have access to additional GPUs/mobo/CPU/PSU to test.

I play overwatch a lot, and I've encountered a reset only once so far.
I develop using unreal engine and have encountered more resets while using it.


Sometimes windows sound (device unplugged sound) plays when the screen goes black. Once when the screen went blank, i had music playing and the audio was looping, so I'm sure the PC crashed then.

When the PC restarts, its is as if pressing the restart button and this happens most of the time. The least frequency between restarts was around 5 mins. It doesn't restart immediately after login.

Once when the screens went blank I pressed the power button and my pc went to sleep. When I put it on again only my primary screen alone worked and the resolution was set to 1024x768 and I could not change it. It said the display driver failed to start.

I tried running a stress test (OCCT) for 1 hour to see if my psu/gpu was failing but it did not reset then. It randomly restarted the next day though. (I shut down during that night)

I did not realise that there were BSODs happening sometimes because my monitors went blank, but when I checked my event viewer I noticed a minidump.

No artefacts on screen and no flickering of any sorts.

When I see my temperatures on corsair link the cpu is around 39-45 idle and goes to about 65 on load. GPU idle is 50 on idle and 80 on load

When I check the wattage power draw on my UPS it rarely exceeds 350 watts. While playing overwatch its around 150 watts.

Thank you for taking the time to read my post. Please help me identify and solve this issue I'm facing.


Things I have done :
Reinstall OS (again)
Run memtest (pass)
Remove overclock

System
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
Intel i7 4770k @ stock clocks with corsair h100i
Asrock Extreme 6AC
4x4GB memory
Zotac Nvidia GTX970
120GB SSD Samsung 840 Evo for OS
250GB SSD Samsung 850 Evo for programs
2 TB HDD Seagate ST2000VX003 for data
800w Corsair gs 800

Hi fBlah, I'm very new (as in one day) to the debugging world, but since nobody else has responded, I'll take a whack (I do have quite a bit of experience with non-debug hardware and driver troubleshooting). According to the minidump it looks like your display driver (nvlddmkm.sys) is at fault. May not be the only thing wrong, but it seems as likely a place to start as any.

First thing I would try is updating/reinstalling your GPU driver, downloaded from either Zotac Support page (https://www.zotac.com/us/support#download) or from the Geforce page (Drivers | GeForce). (Some additional notes on this at the bottom of this post.)

If that doesn't fix it, I would try it again, but use the following steps:

1. Disable MS auto driver install (How to Prevent Windows from Automatically Updating Specific Drivers )
2. Download most current driver for your GPU, either from Nvidia or Zotac Support. Put the file somewhere you can find it easily.
3. Uninstall your GPU driver via device manager. Alternatively you can use Display Driver Uninstaller (Display Driver Uninstaller Download version 17.0.8.4) and use the "Clean and restart" option from Safe Mode. Make sure you unzip the file before using, otherwise you can have issues. I've used DDU for years (I go through a LOT of GPUs) without a hitch.
4. After reboot, double click on the GPU installer file and let it do it's thing.

If that doesn't fix the issue, you can start looking at other possibilities like conflicts with associated drivers or BIOS/UEFI.

Note on nVidia drivers - you probably already know this but if not, the driver download is actually an installer package which will also load GeForce Experience. If you like it then you're all set - if not, you can simply uninstall it through Settings-->Apps & Features. Uninstalling GeForce Experience will not affect the display driver. If you keep it, see the following:

Nvidia GeForce Experience Node.js security vulnerability - gHacks Tech News
Disable NVIDIA Streamer Service and other NVIDIA processes - gHacks Tech News
Disable Nvidia Telemetry tracking on Windows - gHacks Tech News

Hi volcanoscout, thank you for your reply. I have followed the steps you have listed and reinstalled the graphic drivers without GeForce Experience. I hope this solves the problem. I will continue using the system to see if the problem is resolved.

Unfortunately that did not solve the problem. This time my PC cut off with only the PSU and power light working. Everything else cut off including PC fans. I could hear white noise through the speakers. No BSOD is available.