Alert, XPS8940 Nvidia card lock up restarted for me.

Literally after months of NO lock ups, so many months I can't recall the last one, it happened to me yesterday.

For the record, I have an Nvidia RTX2060 6GB card supplied by Dell and supposedly made by MSI for Dell (card does NOT look like the MSI retail card, larger single fan vs. the retail 2 smaller fans).

Many months ago I discovered that setting the Nvidia Control Panel Power setting to MAX. POWER 'fixed' the problem for me.

I use the Game Ready Driver and when installing via GeForce Experience, use the CLEAN INSTALL option for the standard install.

At the beginning I did experience Lock ups with new drivers, but in ALL cases, looking at the Control Panel I discovered that caused the Power setting to be reset to Optimum, the Default for my card. Resetting that fixed the problem.

Recently, maybe 2 or 3 drivers ago I noticed that the default for Power was set again. I left it,  and for a few new drivers never had a lock-up with the default power setting.

Well, I did this time. I've reset it to Max. Power and will see if that works or not? If NOT, I'll go back to the prior driver using DDU first to clear out all remnants of any Nvidia components and the driver.

Present latest Game Ready Driver is V572.16 released on Jan. 30, 2025.

Prior driver was V566.36 released on Dec. 4, 2024.

So far, with limited testing and run time, and the power set to Max. Power, I've not had an issue.

I should mention the Install only installed the new driver, the PhysX and Audio driver were the same version as in the prior install and not updated.

Also, I had a strange Desktop resolution problem.

Normally, I run a 3840x2160@60Hz, but when the installed removed the driver, and it switched to the Intel Internal HD750, the display would normally be set to a lower resolution and all the icons moved to fit. I had to restore the locations (via a program that saves it) when the new driver installed. This time, I was like the resolution was 2x what it was, very odd, like only 2/3rds of the screen or so showed the desktop icon's? Normally, all other times, when the new driver was installed, I'd have an extra column on the right of the screen requiring the icon positions to be reset? Not this time, it was correct. Very odd that the HD750 looked like that?