I hope I can find some answers here as, over the years, I have been able to consistently find some solutions to problems I've encountered. My system is as follows:
FX 8350 at Stock Clock (Was Overclocked to 4.2 GHz)
M5A97 R2.0 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 8GB 1600 MHz RAM
Asus Strix R9 390 8GB VRAM at Stock Clocks (1050 Mhz and 1050/1118 mV)
Crucial MX500 250 GB SSD
WD Blue 1TB HDD
Corsair CX600 600W 80+ Bronze PSU
This image sums up the problem. What I am trying to figure out is if my GPU has reached the end of its life, because I've gone through several checks before coming here. On low intensity programs, like Firefox or Chrome, graphics artifacts (small black and red groupings of pixels) will sporadically appear across the screen. The mouse cursor appears in front of these artifacts. When I go into larger programs, such as Minecraft of X-Plane, the program can run for a few minutes, and then the artifacts get worse until the point the screen goes black, and the monitor loses signal from the computer. It never recovers from this state. While this is occuring, the mV and Power Target remain the same. I have also uninstalled the AMD drivers, and the problem still occurs on the basic Windows drivers. I know this computer is probably due for an upgrade, but I don't want to go out and buy a new graphics card if it turns out it actually a motherboard/CPU issue.
FX 8350 at Stock Clock (Was Overclocked to 4.2 GHz)
M5A97 R2.0 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 8GB 1600 MHz RAM
Asus Strix R9 390 8GB VRAM at Stock Clocks (1050 Mhz and 1050/1118 mV)
Crucial MX500 250 GB SSD
WD Blue 1TB HDD
Corsair CX600 600W 80+ Bronze PSU
This image sums up the problem. What I am trying to figure out is if my GPU has reached the end of its life, because I've gone through several checks before coming here. On low intensity programs, like Firefox or Chrome, graphics artifacts (small black and red groupings of pixels) will sporadically appear across the screen. The mouse cursor appears in front of these artifacts. When I go into larger programs, such as Minecraft of X-Plane, the program can run for a few minutes, and then the artifacts get worse until the point the screen goes black, and the monitor loses signal from the computer. It never recovers from this state. While this is occuring, the mV and Power Target remain the same. I have also uninstalled the AMD drivers, and the problem still occurs on the basic Windows drivers. I know this computer is probably due for an upgrade, but I don't want to go out and buy a new graphics card if it turns out it actually a motherboard/CPU issue.