Reply To: Thank you, and PC question.

[Adrian Bellworthy]

Hey CC!
Your specs are pretty much on the minimum requirements to run Blender. Meaning its capable of general modeling and texturing tasks, However once you get into more complex scenes, higher vertex count, complex mathematical calculations such as volumetric fog, then your system may struggle to keep up.

Do you have Intel’s Turbo Boost enabled for the CPU? 
This can increase the CPU clock speed from 2.80GHz to around 3.20GHz

It would also be advisable to invest in extra RAM, 8GB is barely enough to run most software these days. I would aim for 32GB, 16GB as the minimum.

The GTX 660 is over 10 years old now, and I believe drivers and support ended in 2021. Most hardware, although still functionable, is considered out dated within 4 years after its release. This is driven mainly by the continuous evolution of hardware and software, and the ability, (or willingness, as this eats away at profit), of manufacturers such as Nvidia to offer long term support.

And lastly, make sure your drivers are up to date. I have Windows automatic updates disabled, because it can slow my computer when it regularly checks for updates continuously all day. I prefer to manually check for updates once a month. By doing this, new updates often have bugs, by the time I update most of these bugs have been fixed.

As said though, I believe Nvidia ended drivers for this GPU in 2021. You maybe wise to try and download the last driver available direct from Nvidia, and stick with that until you can up date the GPU.
Windows will update the outdated GPU driver with its own basic driver, which will probably be worse than the last available from Nvidia.  
Disabling Windows auto update will prevent this, when you manually update the drivers you can cancel any video drivers that are listed.
To do this, go to Settings > Updates, and click Pause Updates for 7 Days. The max I think is about 5 weeks.

Ps. It may even be beneficial to use CPU render only, to try eliminating the render time crashes.