Underclocking GPU/ 116 BSOD

Coinage

I have a samsung RF711-2 laptop I bought roughly a year ago with a 2 ghz i7, 8 gigs of ram, Geforce GT 540m 1 GB, and SSD. I have recently been experiencing random BSODs after playing for a little while on one of the maps in League of Legends, Deus Ex Human Revolution and Batman Arkham Asylum with the message "attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed". You would think it might be heat (which concerned me enough when I first got it and was playing TF2 that I sent it in to Samsung, but they said it was fine), so I downloaded GPU Z, and it does get quite hot when playing Deus Ex, up to 90-95 C. However, I get similar temperatures during Hard Reset, which I have never had any problems with (other than occasional FPS drops), the crashes don't correlate with the maximum temperatures, and the crashes happen roughly as frequently even when I turned everything down to low and it's only 70-85 C (which is similar to the temperatures I see in LoL). And I can play the other two older maps on League of Legends indefinitely with no problems, and although the new one is probably poorly optimized, it shouldn't be putting anywhere near the kind of strain on my system that a modern shooter does.

Someone on a forum somewhere said that underclocking can help improve the stability of this card since, like I guess every mobile graphics product, it's kind of shit, and I don't really mind losing some quality because I don't have high standards. And Nvidia does have tools that let you fiddle with that with the newest driver, but I feel like I shouldn't just put random numbers in, so does anyone know anything about this? And if it really is probably heat, I am willing to buy a cooler for use while gaming, although I haven't really been happy with what I've seen.

TetraNitroCubane

This is really interesting to me. I had similar issues on a desktop machine running an EVGA GTX 570 Superclocked and playing Deus Ex Human Revolution. Every other game out there was fine, but Deus Ex in Dx11 mode would just spontaneously shut down exactly as you describe. I thought it might've been heat, but reading around online indicated that the 570 Superclock was probably unable to support the factory overclock given the voltage limitations that the hardware suffers.

Long story short, when I pulled the card back to factory stock settings, it was rock solid. And I saw no performance hit.

It's a little trickier with your card, because it's not a factory overclocked card, so there aren't reference clocks to step down to. Nevertheless, it looks like the GT 540m is based on the GT 435M, but at higher clock settings. So for a first pass, you might try the GT 435M clock settings:

Core Speed: 650 MHz
Shader Speed: 1300 MHz
Memory Speed: 800 MHz

Hopefully those manage to tighten up stability while keeping performance reasonable. They're not too much slower than the stock settings on the 540m. Hope it works for you! I remember how damn frustrating this was to deal with when I had the issue.