I'm a little dumbfounded here. I've had Borderlands, Shift 2 and PlanetSide 2 all crash on me in the past few days. This has only really started happening now, as I can't recall a crash to desktop since I upgraded my rig in December last year. Speaking of which, it's now slouch in any department, which is why I remain confused as to what is causing these crash incidents. I've got an Intel i7 3770k 3.40GHZ Quad core CPU, a Nvidia GTX 680 (latest drivers are updated, I'm certain of it) GPU, 1000W PSU and 12 gigs of RAM, so unless I'm throwing it into the fires of Mount Doom, I don't expect overheating to be an issue.

Virus, Malware, Torjan, corrupt hard drive. Try a reformat and see if that fixes your problems. (Sorry for the slow reply).

If anything, the higher the specs the easier it is to overheat.

Anyway, your symptoms don't sound like overheating. The whole system usually freezes when it overheats, not just the game. Anything abnormal in Event Viewer? Perhaps the crashes are getting logged. Not much more to go on unless you have some more specific information. Only thing I can suggest, is double check you have latest updates of everything, Audio, Video, Windows, etc.

Are the games crashing after relatively long sessions, fairly quickly, what? Need more info.

@tycobb: They happened within 5-20 minutes of the games running. After this post was originally made, I had another crash, this time a hard lock-up with Metro Last Light, though that may have been settings being too high. I haven't had a crash happen since. However, these incidents only started happening after the latest driver update from Nvidia was issued. I have a hunch that might have something to do with it, since these were my first to-desktop/system crashes since getting the rig upgraded last December.

+1 probably that otherwise try a reformat. As its just crashing to desktop i doubt its your card as they normally result in the computer completely freezeing when it has happened to me in the past.

have you actually checked your temps?

@devildoll: The GPU was reaching up to 80+C during Metro: Last Light, but other than that, temps were not alarming.

Google it regarding suspicions of the nvidia driver, if it's happening to you it's happening to others in a forum somewhere

HDD's healthy?.

Installed anything recently that is running in the background?

What sort of crash is it? Just a screen lock up? Is there discolouration, artifacting or frame rate drops leading up to it?

The weather's getting hot. At least here.

@rowr: Yeah, I just hit it up on google and apparently the update not only causes games to crash, but can also cause trouble within browsers when doing stuff like watching Youtube vids. Seems like Nvidia really screwed the pooch on this one.

@jclane: Are you sure you are not using amd drivers? They are always so terrible and buggy.

Jokes aside, 80 c is pretty normal for a full load temp.
Nvidia states that 98 c is the maximum temperature for the card, you're fine in that regard.

If you want to try another driver, head over to guru 3d and look in their archive

Had the same problem some time ago. It was one of the memories that gave me trouble. Replaced it and all is well now. You can test them with a little program called memtest, but it takes many hours (mine took about 7-9 hours for each stick).

@jclane: My system crashed twice in as many hours after installing the new Nvidia drivers while just browsing the web. I re-installed the previous set and everything was fine. They really screwed the new ones up.

Could be the memory try removing them and trying each block separately, also make sure they are the same type/ timings etc. 12 seems like an odd number for ram, it's usually, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 etc (i'm no expert so i could be wrong but that's what i usually read when researching it).

Maybe it could be the PSU as well, it may be faulty and not giving the card enough juice to stay stable(even the best do go bad). Also if your gpu is overclocked it may not be stable. (or anything else you have overclocked).

Also make sure you deleted all the old drivers as well, and/ or try rolling back and see if the problem keeps happening.

hope that at least gets you started troubleshooting, i've had similar problems(not crashing just stuttering) and that's the stuff i got when researching.