In order to achieve the auto-timing counts measurement of nuclear radiation using ORTEC 974 Counter/Timer, an auto-timing counts virtual instrument system based on the LabVIEW virtual instrument development platform and GPIB instrument control and transmission bus protocol is designed in this paper. By introducing software timing technique, the minimum time base of factory setting improves from 0.1 s to 0.03 s. The timing counts performance and longtime stability are also discussed in detail. The automatic data recording and saving facilitates data analysis and processing. Its real-time display and statistic function is very convenient for monitoring the nuclear radiation.