Question Display artifacts, stuttering, crashing

[Toleeedo]

Hello,

I have been to this forum many times over the years trying to figure out my problems but I just cant seem to figure out my current issue. For the past month or so, I cannot play any games on my PC without getting graphical artifacts (Pink dots, squares flashing in and out on my screen). This is foreshadowing to my PC, depending on the game, stuttering and then crashing, or just freezing and requiring a hard reboot.

I have monitored my temps and nothing is out of the ordinary. I have also swapped out my GPU and used my backup and still get the same issues. I did use DDU in safe mode to remove and reinstall drivers for each card. I have ran memtestg80, memtest86, AIDA64, 3d Mark Demo, among some others, and each test comes back telling me that everything is fine, and there are no errors. I am at a complete loss and hoping maybe someone here could point me in the right direction.

I am not the most computer savvy guy on the planet but I do follow directions well and am willing to provide you with whatever information you may need.

Windows is updated to current
Nvidia drivers are up to date with most recent
I have uninstalled MSI Afterburner as I read that could cause issue (Although, running the MSI AB OC test, I was at 35% confidence with stock settings, no OC)
Motherboard flashed with current BIOS settings
Chipset drivers up to date
Purchased new PSU thinking that was the issue
Im sure im leaving some things out. I didnt do all of this on my own, the gaming clan I am in has a friendly tech group who helped run me through all the troubleshooting mentioned above.

My PC Specs are as follows:

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/Toleeedo/saved/dM2vnQ

i5-9600k 3.7 GHZ 6-core processor
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8 GB WINDFORCE
MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon ATX LGA 1151
Team Vulcan 16GB (2x8 GB) DDR4-3000
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME SSD
Corsair RMx (2018) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

Again, if anyone decides to throw their hat in the ring, I kindly thank you in advance. I have attached images of the artifacts in Borderlands 3. I will try to post images from the other games if it will help.

 

[R_1]

this may not be helpful but here goes.thinking in type, I first thought was the monitor, did you test with another? worth a shot, however the monitor would not cause a system crash. that third picture would seem to clear the monitor, the artifact is behind the mini map. which lead me through your testing list. that board has three PCIe slots have you tried the middle slot in lieu of swapping out the mobo. the GPU swap showed that the PCIe slot may be a suspect as the GPU's are still spotty. couldn't help myself.

try with a single stick of RAM
how many passes did memtest86 run? 5 is good.
have you tried another environment to clear the software? boot to linux on thumb-drive and see if you can recreate the issue.

Boot to a USB drive with linux on it. grab a USB drive, a copy of rufus and a linux distribution.
http://distrowatch.com/ has tons of differing linux distributions and download links. I personally am fond of linux mint with cinnamon.
https://rufus.ie/ the utility used to extract the ISO file to the USB drive.

use rufus to extract the selected ISO to the thumb drive. it will make the drive bootable and you can run linux from the drive once done.
Reboot into linux and proceed to test the hardware. connect to internet, watch videos, await problems.
if linux is good and stable the issue is most likely inside windows or otherwise software related.
this is a test of the hardware.

 

[SkyNetRising]

That looks like graphics driver or game issue.
Try changing ingame graphics quality settings.
Or ... you can also try older graphics driver versions.

 

[Toleeedo]

this may not be helpful but here goes.thinking in type, I first thought was the monitor, did you test with another? worth a shot, however the monitor would not cause a system crash. that third picture would seem to clear the monitor, the artifact is behind the mini map. which lead me through your testing list. that board has three PCIe slots have you tried the middle slot in lieu of swapping out the mobo. the GPU swap showed that the PCIe slot may be a suspect as the GPU's are still spotty. couldn't help myself.

I have tried switching PCIe slot with both cards and get the same results.

try with a single stick of RAM
how many passes did memtest86 run? 5 is good.
have you tried another environment to clear the software? boot to linux on thumb-drive and see if you can recreate the issue.

Boot to a USB drive with linux on it. grab a USB drive, a copy of rufus and a linux distribution.
http://distrowatch.com/ has tons of differing linux distributions and download links. I personally am fond of linux mint with cinnamon.
https://rufus.ie/ the utility used to extract the ISO file to the USB drive.

use rufus to extract the selected ISO to the thumb drive. it will make the drive bootable and you can run linux from the drive once done.
Reboot into linux and proceed to test the hardware. connect to internet, watch videos, await problems.
if linux is good and stable the issue is most likely inside windows or otherwise software related.
this is a test of the hardware.

I will try running with a single stick of RAM. I just shutdown normally. Remove the stick, and then boot back up? Nothing else needs to be done?
I ran memtest86 for just under 3 hours, i think it was 4 passes. I can find the report, I think i saved it actually.
I have never used linux before, I am wiling to give that a go.

 

[Toleeedo]

That looks like graphics driver or game issue.
Try changing ingame graphics quality settings.
Or ... you can also try older graphics driver versions.

That was my initial thought. I dropped it down to 1080p and all it does is delay the issue. I have used older drivers, most current, studio drivers, etcc... All ending in the same results. It very well could be GPU related tho as the lower the settings, the longer it takes to show itself.

 

[Toleeedo]

The most latest error I got was "video driver crashed and was reset" causing game to instantly ctd

 

[SkyNetRising]

That was my initial thought. I dropped it down to 1080p and all it does is delay the issue.

Was not talking about resolution but graphics quality settings.