Is my graphics card dying? Or is it display drivers?

[KHendrickson93]

So one night, I tried launching a game, which lead to the display driver crashing.

Right before the display driver crashed, I was seeing red pixels and graphical artifacts (picture link below)

https://imgur.com/a/uUdMl


The display driver did not recover successfully, which soon caused a 0x0000116 bsod.

After this all happened, I noticed my nvidia icon disappeared in the system tray.

Updating my graphics driver didn't fix anything and the nvidia icon is still missing.

I then used DDU to do a clean uninstallation of my graphics drivers, then tried a manual installation of nvidia latest graphics driver (which included GeForce experience).

Attempting to play any games or watch any videos is soon followed by graphical artifacts, the graphics drivers crashing, the screen going black, coming back on and then bluescreening.

The nvidia icon has yet to reappear, which has me stumped: is it the graphics card giving me issues? Or is it the graphics driver causing issues?

 

[Sedivy]

That looks very familiar and is indeed common when your graphics card is dying. It's usually due to prolonged overheating, over time killing the card, but it could be just a simple hardware failure too. You can get hwmonitor and see where your gpu temps hover while in game. Not that it'll change anything at this point, damage is likely done, but it may give you caution to more carefully monitor the temps with whatever next card you get.

 

[KHendrickson93]

That looks very familiar and is indeed common when your graphics card is dying. It's usually due to prolonged overheating, over time killing the card, but it could be just a simple hardware failure too. You can get hwmonitor and see where your gpu temps hover while in game. Not that it'll change anything at this point, damage is likely done, but it may give you caution to more carefully monitor the temps with whatever next card you get.

Should the nvidia icon return with a new graphics card?

 

[maestripieritimo]

sedivy is probably right, card sounds semi-dead and dying more. The icon is just the geforce experience aplication running, it is not needed for the card to work

 

[Sedivy]

Well the nvidia icon should have technically returned with ddu uninstall and reinstall of fresh drivers. If latest drivers don't work, you can ddu uninstall again and get an older version that you're certain worked for you.
If you go into device manager, is your graphics card listed? Is there a yellow triangle with a ! next to it?

 

[KHendrickson93]

Windows startup is now stuck on this image with graphical artifacts flickering

https://imgur.com/a/3XqjY


I can't get passed that screen. I'm gonna try taking out the graphics card, which it will probably boot fine, BUT I won't get to see if there's a (!)Caution(!) icon in the device manager

 

[Sedivy]

Graphical artefacts like that are a pretty universal sign your gpu is going. It can sometimes happen due to say cabling to the monitor or improperly grounded cables for the monitor but it's pretty clear cause of the driver crash that it has nothing to do with your monitor.
You can try putting in that gpu into another computer, and should you see the same thing, it'll be pretty indicative your gpu is almost dead.
If you can however boot into safe mode with gpu out of your computer, and still see issues, then it might be something else. But i'd say not.

 

[KHendrickson93]

Graphical artefacts like that are a pretty universal sign your gpu is going. It can sometimes happen due to say cabling to the monitor or improperly grounded cables for the monitor but it's pretty clear cause of the driver crash that it has nothing to do with your monitor.
You can try putting in that gpu into another computer, and should you see the same thing, it'll be pretty indicative your gpu is almost dead.
If you can however boot into safe mode with gpu out of your computer, and still see issues, then it might be something else. But i'd say not.

I took the graphics card out of the computer and it booted fine with no issues. I guess I'll RMA this graphics card then.

Just to be safe, should I DDU uninstall my graphics driver again?

If so, should I install the graphics driver before or after I've installed the new gpu?

 

[Sedivy]

You should definitely DDU uninstall the graphics driver before you install the new gpu.
You can install the new gpu's graphics driver before you actually physically plug it in but it may refuse to install if it can't detect it already plugged in. it'll depend on the drivers/card manufacturer. It won't much matter which is done first so don't stress about it.

One more thing. Is this card actually new enough to rma? Cause this kind of failure is rare on relatively new cards unless you've got huge temperature issues (check with hwmonitor) or if it's a factory defect of some kind.

 

[KHendrickson93]

You should definitely DDU uninstall the graphics driver before you install the new gpu.
You can install the new gpu's graphics driver before you actually physically plug it in but it may refuse to install if it can't detect it already plugged in. it'll depend on the drivers/card manufacturer. It won't much matter which is done first so don't stress about it.

Alright. Well in that case, I'll DDU uninstall that graphics driver and wait for my new gpu to get here. Thanks for your help man!

 

[KHendrickson93]

You should definitely DDU uninstall the graphics driver before you install the new gpu.
You can install the new gpu's graphics driver before you actually physically plug it in but it may refuse to install if it can't detect it already plugged in. it'll depend on the drivers/card manufacturer. It won't much matter which is done first so don't stress about it.

One more thing. Is this card actually new enough to rma? Cause this kind of failure is rare on relatively new cards unless you've got huge temperature issues (check with hwmonitor) or if it's a factory defect of some kind.

The card is a refurbished gtx 780. It's about a 4 year old graphics card. There were no signs of it dying up until I launched that game

 

[Sedivy]

Ahhh. Yes then definitely if you can rma, do. That it a bad apple someone gave you.