Originally Posted by
AOD_Shpeckledorf
Hey wait! My friend had this exact same problem, and he just kind of dealt with the crashes. I found out later he was having the problem and fixed it pretty easily for him. His problem, just to be clear, was that when he played moderately powerful games and/ or high end games like CS:GO or Tomb Raider on Ultra, his GPU would crash and a message at the bottom right corner of his monitor would say something like "The display driver stopped responding and has recovered".
The way I fixed it, was by FIRST: Lowering his fan curve, because it was actually drawing a lot more power than you'd think (It was at 100% curve), THEN, on his desktop, right clicked, and opened the Nvidia control panel. From there, I went to "Manage 3D Settings". After that, I navigated to "Global Settings", then clicked "Power Management Mode". When I did that, it gave me the option to switch to either "Adaptive", or "Prefer Maximum Performance". I clicked "Prefer Maximum Performance", then applied the changes.
And Voila! Problem fixed.
ALTHOUGH, did you buy this GPU "Used", or "Refurbished"? If so, the previous owner probably screwed up the card while he was using it or poorly refurbished it. It could just be your card finally dying on you or something, if the above solution doesn't work.