BSOD - DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL with nvlddmkm.sys and ntoskrnl.ex

[Narcosis]

Hey there,

My computer began to crash with this particular BSOD since 10th of may. Back then, I've been playing one Unity-based 3d game for quite a while and this might or might not be related; eitherway, it caused a system freeze and I had to reset. System booted up properly after that. Unaware of the issues yet, I ran the game again and unfortunately, it froze the system for the second time; had to reset again; after that I got a BSOD with a DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL pointing at nvlddmkm.sys. I tried to restart once more to see, whether it goes away and system loaded up to the floating W7 logo and got stuck on black screen afterwards, instead of usual login screen. I wasn't able to boot up the system normally anymore, which forced me to use the safe mode. After checking the dumps, I decided to uninstall the nvidia drivers completely and that helped - system loaded up properly and installed the default windows software driver, I am running on right now.

I literally have no idea what's going on; I can use my PC normally at the moment, but every attempt to install nvidia drivers again ends up in the same exact circumstances - single BSOD and black screens afterwards past the W7 logo, when I try to restart.

I actually planned to swap my current GPU with an older GTS250 to test, whether it's a gpu hardware failure; unfortunately, today I got another BSOD, while typing in Skype and Firefox running in the background, only with ntoskrnl.exe instead, error 0x000000fc. So far it was the only one crash outside the past nvidia driver fault I got, though. All the information should be in the dumps included within the attached file. That aside, I normally use Avast, but I already uninstalled it just to make sure there are no additional conflicts.

To add, even though it's a preety dated pc (motherboard is more than 8 years old), it's still in good shape and I never had any critical system or hardware failures in the past, nor when I upgraded to W7 (clean install).

If anyone knows what's causing the issue and what can be done to avoid a complete system reinstall (hopefully), I'd be really grateful for any help. I'm starting to get desperate and this issue is hampering my work productivity

 

[Narcosis]

Update:

I swapped the GTX460 with my older GTS250 for testing. Apparently, it seems the GTX460 got damaged and all the misleading BSOD's were actually caused by it's faulty behavior. I'll upgrade to 750ti in a while. This case can be considered as solved, but I'll leave the thread open for a bit more just in case.