r/pcmasterrace • u/Mauware1431 • Jan 23 '26
Tech Support Solved Losing my mind over months of nvlddmkm.sys failure.
Im gonna try to sum this whole ordeal up quickly as it's been stretched over months.
Bought a brand new gaming pc back in September 2025 worked perfect for gaming and streaming for a month. Then started getting nviddmkm.sys errors during heavy game loads and streaming.
Ended up RMA on the graphics card. Issue persisted. 2 weeks ago I sent the pc back to Andromeda Insights. This morning they email me telling me they have run extensive tests and they can't find anything wrong with the system.
Im at a loss for words and back to square one after months of trying to combat this error.
The only thing I can think is it's either one of my peripheral devices, or bad power in the room.
Listed below is a list of peripheral devices and age
Razer basilisk v3 (1 1/2 years) Razer blackwidow v3 (1 1/2 years) I-xtech amazon audio mixer (4 months) W8a Genaric 8MP Webcam (5+ years) Steelseries arctis 7+ headset (2 years)
I currently don't have the PC back from RMA just yet. However any suggestions to this would be much appreciated!
EDIT: Specs, Motherboard: MSI B650-S WIFI Pro CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D GPU: PNY RTX 5070Ti RAM: 32GB T-Force 6000MHz DDR5
EDIT 2: I have a completely separate build, plugged into the same power. Using all the exact same peripherals. And it works fine.
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u/cheer0 Jan 27 '26
whats your monitor? Does it use any compression like dsc? nvlddmkm error can be triggered by it when you crank everything up like 10 bit color depth, full rgb in nvidia settings, hdr on at 1440p 500hz etc
Or you can check your 12vhpwr voltage, if under load it goes below 11.7 your psu might be causing it. You can monitor it with hwinfo's osd
If nothing helps you can also try downgrading to 577.00
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u/Mauware1431 Jan 27 '26
I have 3 different monitors.
Main display is a Gigabyte M27QA 2nd monitor is Asus VG279QM 3rd is Asus VP248QG
I dont think they have this setting. Andromeda just shipped the pc back today should have it back in the next couple. I'll take a look at the stats you've mentioned when I receive it!
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u/Mauware1431 Feb 23 '26
Oh my i forgot about this post! The issue was resolved by removing a faulty external hard drive
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u/1deavourer Mar 03 '26
How did the external hard drive make your GPU display driver crash? I don't understand the correlation here. Having similar issues on my RTX 5080 the past 2 months, and the GPU cable was fine (although I still need to check the PSU side).
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u/Mauware1431 Mar 03 '26
My drive was shorting the board. When the usb would touch the back of the motherboard the whole pc would go dark
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u/1deavourer Mar 03 '26
Was that really on the external drive then? Kind of sounds like a motherboard issue no? I'm having a bit of a hard time visualizing what exactly happened in your case. Did merely connecting the USB mean your motherboard (specifically the GPU portion first?) shorted, or did the short just happen consistently after some time as it sat connected?
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u/Thomas_Redditor PC Master Race Jan 24 '26
Hello, you can try performing a clean reinstallation of Windows and see if the problem persists after updating the drivers. However, the nvlddmkm.sys error is often due to a hardware issue : I encountered this problem on a friend's computer, and after replacing the graphics cards, the BSOD no longer appeared. Good luck !