Display goes black during gameplay, browser problems, display driver stopping working, computer crashes; need help pinpointing

[AnxiousBlue]

Was not sure if this went under Displays or Graphics Cards so I took a chance. If this is placed wrong, my apologies.

A friend of mine has an issue, which follows:

Windows 10 Enterprise 64-bit
Intel Core i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
16GB RAM
GTX 970 (Zotac)
Started out as flittering black boxes when browsing on Chrome and Firefox. couple days later during my gameplay time started getting Kernel errors and display driver has stopped responding messages. Sometimes after that it would just crash the game and take me to the desktop, others the screen would black out and force to me to force restart.
I have opened it up and cleaned dust out, made sure everything was plugged in correctly. Will attempt to update my drivers tonight and see if it helps.
temps have been 40-50c across the board
Computer and parts not very old, only over a year

My gut instinct tells me it's her GPU that's dying?
Thank you very much in advance. Hopefully this is sufficent information. 😀

 

[DanDOGGO]

Before you draw any lines, I'd update the drivers first and see if that fixes anything. Did you just check for dust and properly fitted cables? Or did you also try and re seat the GPU? I usually double check these things in case. Hope some of that helps

 

[AnxiousBlue]

Friend gave me an update! Here it is:

so clean install of drivers did not fix it. this time it pixelated the screen and gave me a message about application being blocked from the graphics driver?

"application has been blocked from accessing graphics hardware" actual message

clean install of graphics driver. and completely removed nvidea expience. i didnt reinstall that

used DDU program to do it