[Tricky]

I've been in contact with MSI today, and I made the best progress so far. First they came with the idea of pointing a case fan at the passive heatsink, to cool it extra during crashes. This was interesting as it made no difference at all. It was good to know the heatsink hadn't damaged the GPU after all.

MSI doesn't make their own firmware drivers, they pretty much fall in line with whatever drivers Nvidia writes. In my case, a 2 year old driver for my 4 year old model video card solved my issues (for the time being). The 'latest' driver, 190.38 is nothing more than a generic, unspecific driver. The 162.18 driver is more stable. I could perhaps upgrade them a little further, but so far everything runs just fine. Installing drivers I don't strictly need might just as well introduce more trouble again.