Artifacts and Drivers Crashs. Mostly on cold boot

[Ziboo]

Hi,

I don't know where to go or what to do anymore...

My rig worked for 1.5 years now without any issues, and now I have strange artifacts on the screen, sometimes pink pixels all over, sometimes black triangles, sometime just nvidia drivers that crash and restart or not, sometimes just the display that stop, but the pc never crash, just the display, and I need to do a hard reboot.

I went to a Pc Repair Store, the guy didn't find anything. He tested the GPU for 10 hours, tested the RAM, rebuild the case, nothing...

I though it could be windows, I formatted, reinstall windows, same thing...

I tried with another Graphic Card, I had artifacts too (I think it would be very unlucky to have 2 faulty GC but... why not)

The issue happens mostly on cold boot, when my rig was off for 1 or 2 hours.

Sometime I can play games for 5 hours straight without any bugs... (Hitman, Deus Ex Mankind, all in Ultra)

So I really don't know what's going on....

Is it the graphic card ?
Is it the motherboard ?
Is it the cpu ?
Is it the PSU ?

I hope someone can help me here, because even if I wanted to buy a new piece of hardware, I don't even know which one to replace

Thanks for anyone who can take the time to help me.

Following my config:

Monitors: 2 x 1920x1200
OS: Windows 7 SP1
MB: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 5
CPU: Intel Core i7 4770K - Processeur
GC: MSI GeForce GTX 970 4 Go (Drivers 372.90)
FAN: Noctua NH-D14 SE2011
PSU: Corsair CX600M
RAM: G.Skill Ares F3-1600C10D (2 x 8 Go) Dual Channel - PC3-12800 (1600 MHz) - 10-10-10 2N - 1,5V

Edit:
I unplunged my GC and plug my monitor on the onboard vga. So far, no artifacts... So I don't know if it's the GC, the motherboard, or psu...

 

[Ziboo]

Hello again.

So I couldn't test my GC at work, but I land it to a friend who tested it, and he had the same artifacts. So I think it is case closed... I will send the GC to RMA and when it get back I hope that it was just the GC that was failing.

Thanks a lot for your help

 

[Obakasama]

At least you managed to confirm it was the 970 then. Hopefully the next one will work properly.