MSI GTX580 Twin Frozr II OC Edition; Battlefield 3 green squares artifact crash.

Question

Greetings respected moderators!
I came to your forum because I seek your help. Allow me to explain my problem. Today when I've played Battlefield 3 after a while my game crashed - it froze in place. The screen displayed small green square artifacts all over the screen. I had to force shut down the game with task manager in order to resume using my computer. I've restarted my game and continued playing it until it happened two more times in a short amount of time. Then I've decided to look into it.
This is what my screen looked liked, although this image is not mine. I'm only using it as a reference.
The most interesting thing is that I've only had this happen to me(exactly the same type of crash) once or twice in the past when I still had the old drivers. Back then I was using High video settings in my game. About a week or so ago I formatted my computer and installed the latest NVIDIA drivers - 310.90. This time I was using the lowest video settings in my game. Yet the game crashed more than it did with the higher settings. This puzzles me...
I did some research on the internet and what I've found out is that this type of crash is very commonly associated with GTX 580. Users with the same problems posted on many forums and the replies they got were all sorts of possible reasons why this crash occurs. One of them is being overheating. I've tested that and ran my game the fourth time after my third crash, and the temperatures of the GPU didn't go over 70°C. Then I've also did a stress test with MSI Kombustor and the temperature stayed under 70°C. So I believe I can exclude overheating.
The next very common thing that users wrote was that the GTX 580's core voltage was set too low by factory default, causing this type of crash with DirectX 11 games while playing them. By manually increasing the voltage it seemed that it was the most common fix for the problem. According to MSI Afterburner my core voltage is 1025 and people on the forums suggested raising it to 1100, therefore fixing their crashing.
Third thing that I've read was that this is caused by the latest 310.90 drivers. Some users with the problems reverted to the old drivers and the crashing stopped, while it didn't fix it for others.
Now my questions is: Why did my game start crashing all of a suddenly, in such way on lowest video settings and so frequently, when I could play it for months on end with higher settings without a single crash?
I do not want to overclock my GPU and unfortunately I do not remember which were the NVIDIA drivers I was using before I formatted my computer.
I thank you in advance, wise moderators of this forum and hope that you will be able to help me.
Have a wonderful day! 

Answer 1

Good day to you Svet!
Like I've wrote before, the only changes I did to my computer were the updates that came with Live Update 5. I only installed driver updates through that. I did it regularly ever since I've got my computer 7 months ago. Back in those 7 months the crash only happened once or twice.
Then a week ago I formatted my computer completely, reinstalled Windows 7 and also applied all of the available updates that came with Live Update 5. I've also downloaded the latest NVIDIA GPU drivers. The game worked flawlessly for the whole week until it started crashing yesterday.
Also I had no idea that the overheating could start at under 70°C, especially because I have two extra fans installed, one in the front and one in the back of my case so that there is regular flow of cold air, which enters in the front and exits at the back.