The long version:

I just spend months fixing up my old place and selling it, then moving into a new house, sorting stuff, stuccoing walls, painting, rewirering the electricity, finding affordable new furniture, hanging Speakers/monitors/shelves/paintings/lights on the walls, my last project was my "dream" home office. All DYI stuff, while having a dayjob. After sawing/painting/installing two custom bookcases from scratch, hanging monitors on the wall, cable managing the crap out of all the wires and installing lights in the bookcase, trying to manage it so not a single wire is in sight: the last thing on the list was finally here: Give my 6 year old PC one last overhaul.

Much surfing showed that the old CPU (I7 2600k sandy bridge) would not bottleneck a GTX 1080 (much) if I ran games in 1440p. To get it ready i spend a ton of time finding the right parts and new monitors, for the right price offcourse. I stripped and cleaned the entire PC (even using compressed air to clean regularly and not having carpet, all I can say is: WOW the DUST), installed a new PSU, added more fans, did a lengthy internal wire management job, sleeved every wire, converted 4 old Hdd's to a single new one. I tested every individual part, and yup all in working order. Last weekend I was ready to play a damn game after months and months of chores.

Offcourse when powering the setup...Now I found one of my Dual monitors wouldn't turn on half the time. Also it would not run in high resolution/refreshrate (the other monitor didnt have a single one of these problems). I spend most of my "quality gaming time" last weekend to figure out that: Displayport cables over 3m/10feet do NOT function normally, yet get sold like they could handle 4k/high refresh/power.

Now with that out of the way I spend an hour or two enjoying a few games on my new setup. Heaven. Preparing for the coming weekend and a crapton of well deserved gaming I remembered to update the Nvidia drivers yesterday, since I hadn't used my desktop in months, or updated drivers for my new card...

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The short version:

Installed the latest October Nvidia drivers: Windows Kernel crashes, every 5 minutes just browsing the web. PSU is fine, no high GPU temps, Dust free PC, RAM Memory checked etc. No hardware faults. Power management set to high performance in GeForce config. Still no dice. Tried DDU/clean install. No improvement. So I rolled back to a September driver update only to find that now literally every 30 seconds Windows kernel crashes happenend while brwosing the web.

Just when I saw my last opportunities to play some games would be hijacked by these issues: I rerolled to a mid August driver...and no problem. Not a single crash yet during all PC activaty.

Now I dont feel like troubleshooting anymore. Why? Read the long version. I realise there are some options in the Registry to prevent kernel crashes, or I could set firefox not to use hardware acceleration. I did not test any games, I did not try google chrome browsing, because the crashes happend as soon as I updated, not before or after trying the last 2 Nvidia driver updates. Now duders I have three questions to anyone that has any experience here:

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TLDR:

1. Have you ever been stuck on a "stable" driver version for your videocard for an extended period? (in 25 years of PC gaming its a first for me)

2. Should I bother registering and telling Nvidia about this problem?

3. Should I man up and spend another troubleshooting weekend on this crap in the near future? because this might be a ductape kind of solution for a problem that might prevent me normal videocard support in the long run?

Thanks duders!

Nvidia has specific driver forums for reporting issues you're having. Whether or not you think your contribution will make a major difference is up to you. But I have seen Nvidia officials reply and follow-up on complaints of faulty drivers. Just be civil, polite, and provide as much information as you can for them to take you seriously. Things get lost in their forums though, so I would also open a support ticket with Nvidia. Just to have easier tracking of your issues.

My rule of thumb is to never update my video drivers unless it's absolutely necessary. Even for new games. I only update my Nvidia drivers if a new game is performing unusually terribly. Then I will look up other posts to narrow it down to either outdated drivers or if a game is actually optimized horribly. Doing this has helped me avoid catastrophic OS or driver level issues for many years.

Since DisplayPort is a royalty-free standard, there are a lot of uncertified DisplayPort cables out there. This has caused a lot of my former customers to believe that they had something faulty in their PC, when it was just an uncertified DisplayPort not meeting the standards.

I'd recommend only buying DisplayPort cables that have been officially tested and certified by the Video Electronics Standards Association and avoid other cables.

@tuxedocruise: Thanks for your reply. I guess I've been lucky all these years, because I mostly updated "blindly" to the latest driver version of any Nvidia/AMD/Voodoo card. Especially during the time I ran the Geforce Experience, a lot of updates have passed. Never a single (significant) issue. Let alone an issue enduring prolonged updates. Its good to know that holding on to a driver version, that is stable, for a prolonged time is a valid way to go in your experience.

As far as the DisplayPort problem: Like your clients experienced, this took me some time troubleshooting. I always used HDMI before. The cable is pretty expensive and I was able to return it, as the seller guaranteed its specs on their website. I live in Europe and sometimes its a problem getting Certified products/links to stuff people found working for them, because its often sold through Amazon (which would mean importing).

Yeah sometimes new drivers aren't good for whatever reason, also what OS and version are you using? I know with windows ten especially there have been constant issues since it released, and they have a brand new update which i haven't used yet that could be causing issues.

Also I only update my drivers if it's for a specific new game i want to play, if the drivers are working then no need to update IMO.

Great. I'm updating my drivers for the first time in months right now...

I'm one of those people who does the nvidia drivers update every time there's a new one.

I could count on my hands the times I've had to revert back to the previous drivers.

I ALWAYS do a clean install of the nvidia drivers. (choose custom install, check the box for clean install)

@oursin_360: Nice to have your insight as well! Updating deliberately sounds like a plan, specifically now that I hear multiple of you duders do this very purposefully.

I currently still run Win 7-64 bit on my desktop. Indeed during my short troubleshooting session yesterday, I've read specifically with Win10 that during driver installation, Nvidia drivers have been experiencing a lot of difficulty lately. Windows 7/8 users seem to experience the Kernel Issues much more frequently, because of how Windows 7/8/Vista determines when drivers seem unresponsive to the OS.

Since you guys only update in specific cases/if you must, just out of curiousity: How often would you estimate that you do run an update? Once or twice a year or something?

I update if I'm playing new releases, there are non-game optimizations or features, support for a Windows update, or if my current driver is having problems in general.

There was a period that i didn't update for a while. I think PUBG was what made me start updating again.

When this thread popped up, I thought I'd have nothing to say since I update when a new driver launches and my system (i5 4690k, Strix 1060) plays newer games just fine at 1080p, give or take some MSAA and some things not on placebo settings. Then I play some original/32-bit Skyrim with the usual mods and EMB installed, and, well, it looks like my 1060 doesn't have enough V-RAM or CUDA cores to handle the extra trees I put in Riverwood and Whiterun since my 750 Ti could well enough last year. And I decided to go back into Far Cry 3 yesterday: Why does the game turn into a Powerpoint presentation for a full seconds at a time when I ride on a jet ski, hang glide, or try to Skyrim my way up a cliff? I pretty forgiving of some stuttering in open world games since stuff has to load and I'm not at the point where I'm playing games from SSDs yet. But for the game to straight up turn into a slideshow on a 1060 this year when that was never an issue on a 750 Ti a year or two ago with the only two differences being graphics settings and drivers, either Newegg sold me a bootleg 1060 last year, or something's up with Nvidia's drivers. And lo and behold: Switched to integrated Intel graphics to uninstall everything Nvidia though the control panel, tested Far Cry 3 using the Windows 10 22.21.13.8205 Nvidia driver update, jet skied, hang glided, and tried to run up multiple hill: Still some stuttering, but no slide shows.

So, thanks for reminding me that I should be skeptical of driver updates, and that I should consider switching to AMD for my next build if this becomes more of a thing.