Windows 7: Is it Nvidia's lousy drivers with windows 7, or my card

Sometimes when I'm using the unreal editor (UT3), my screen will blank out for about 5 seconds, come back on, with an error message in the taskbar, with this in event viewer:

Never happened to me with my GTS 8800 with my old system, so is it the card or the drivers? I've tried multiple versions of Nvidia drivers too.

We need a bit more information in order to tell you anything at all. You need to fill out your system specs and then explain the entire problem in detail. Also, see if you can find any event logs and/or crash logs that describe your problem.

That's the only thing that the event log will tell me when it happens. I'm running windows 7 x64 bit fresh install, computer is 6 months old, Nvidia GTX 285 card, 6 gigs ram PC 12800 triple channel, so I don't know why it only does it with this one program and nothing else?

If you type event log in start menu search, then click on that and look for events there related to your problem, post the details here.

Check the actual Event Log that was referenced by the OP.

Also, Download Speccy and run it. Tell us all of the specs in that page.

Last thing, tell us what version of NVIDIA's drivers you're using.

Check this on NVIDIA forum:

The nvlddmkm error - What is it? - NVIDIA Forums

It could be the only program you use that taxes the graphics engine.
Couple quick tests:
Go to Start > Games > and open Chess Titans. Move some pieces around.
Open nVidia Control Panel and try and change your 3D settings.
See if you get the TDR doing those things.

Please fill out your system specs.

there are many solutions offered for this problem... I went through every single one of them.

Never had any issues with Nvidia cards on my old Win XP Pro rig, but Win7 64bit, doesn't fare so well...

The only thing that actually made things better was to go into the Nvidia control panel under 3D Settings, navigate to Manage 3D Settings then on the right hand side panel under global settings tab, scroll down to Power Management Mode entry and change the setting from Adaptive to "Prefer maximum Performance", then click Apply and exit the panel.
see attached image.



Never had a problem since.