GPU Compute (CUDA) Frequently Crashes Computer I've run into a rather irritating issue when dealing with a somewhat computationally complicated scene (attached below) that is essentially just a pile of volumetrics and lighting.

Whenever I set my project to GPU Compute mode (and set the tile settings to optimal for that), I run the risk of crashing my computer the moment I hit Render. I've Googled around for this issue, only retrieving responses for "Display Driver has stopped responding" messages and black image outputs during rendering. In my case, my displays just turn off after displaying "No Signal". It does not happen EVERY time, though, and I'm having trouble pinning down the trigger.

I've given it 5 minutes of black screen in hopes that it would come back after the scene finishes rendering (in the attached, the current settings usually wrap up after about 2 minutes on my GPU). I have also checked every optimization setting I could find in the project in hopes of alleviating this to no avail.

This has not happened yet in a simple scene. I am exceedingly new to Blender so I can only assume that I've done something terrible to my setup here. However, I would also not be averse to any sort of GPU version of Memtest that I have not tried, in case it's something hardware-related.

CPU Compute mode is not really an option for me, my aging i7 takes almost 30 hours to complete rendering at 1920x1080 (16x16 tiles, path tracing, 7 threads so I can still use the computer, 576 samples after hitting "Square Samples").

Specs:
 - Blender Version: 2.77a
 - OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
 - CPU: Intel i7-2600 @ 3.4Ghz
 - GPU: NVidia GeForce GTX 780 (3GB)
 - RAM: 16GB DDR3 1600  

Project Files: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/39096583/Blender.zip

P.S. Thank goodness for RAID1: every time this issue happens, I get notified that the array needs to be verified and repaired. Feeling good about my choice to go with that over RAID0 or a JBOD...
It's common for this problem to be caused by running out of VRAM on your card.

One way to alleviate the problem is to reduce the tile size. Some of the things in a Blender scene can be swapped to and from the GPU on a per-tile basis. In those cases, a smaller tile size means less data on the GPU.

Other things will be the same size on the GPU regardless of which tile is being rendered, or how big the tile is. Hopefully, that overhead is small enough that reducing the tile size will help.

Cetagon's suggestions are also worth checking out.