Question Monitor 1 showing artifacts

[alanvatrox]

Hello all,
I have a NVidia RTX 3060 OC, using both HDMI cables with DVI adapters for:
Monitor 1 - Acer X243HQ 1920x1080 --- Monitor 2 - Chi Mei Optoelectronics CMC 22 W 1680x1050

For a month or so the first one has been flickering at the bottom-mid of the screen.
This is very annoying because it happens mostly when I boot/unlock my PC, idle or not, sometimes it's random and it can last from 2 seconds to 1 minute or more.

I spoke with NVidia support, I switched PCIe ports, cables, adapters, underclocked, unplugged each monitor individually and it just happens in this monitor.
I also tried to downgrade the drivers, run a benchmark and switched with a GTX 1060, the problem persists.
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I recall doing some updates both for the drivers and for Windows at the time (October) when this started happening, so it could be that or some power management thing, but I'm not sure. I'd think that if the display is dying it would be flickering constantly.

Does anyone have a clue on what's going on here?

Here's a video of it happening when booting & in-game after unlocking Windows:

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

Well, both monitors are pretty old, and the one that's glitchy, may just be because of it's age. Have you ever overlocked the panel?

To be clear, did you buy new adaptors or just swap them between your current cables?

 

[alanvatrox]

Hey there,

Well, both monitors are pretty old, and the one that's glitchy, may just be because of it's age. Have you ever overlocked the panel?

To be clear, did you buy new adaptors or just swap them between your current cables?

Hi,
I did overclock for quite a long time now, both at 65Hz though it often reverts to 60 after some update or change to Nvidia settings.
I swapped both the adapters+cables.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hi,
I did overclock for quite a long time now, both at 65Hz though it often reverts to 60 after some update or change to Nvidia settings.
I swapped both the adapters+cables.

Ah, I see. I'd have to put this down to the age of the monitor, and the OC. Although small OC's don't really do immediate harm, they do reduce the lifespan of monitors. I'd suggest trying another monitor (maybe borrow one from a friend) and see if the issue is still there.

 

[alanvatrox]

Ahaha I never got to post the text

Ah, I see. I'd have to put this down to the age of the monitor, and the OC. Although small OC's don't really do immediate harm, they do reduce the lifespan of monitors. I'd suggest trying another monitor (maybe borrow one from a friend) and see if the issue is still there.

The issue doesn't seem to be there, I tried the 2nd one exclusively for a very short time and saw nothing.

The flickers don't happen when I'm playing CS or a windowed game (unless I let the monitors suspend for a long time while open). They don't show up in the lock screen or when I CTRL+ALT+DEL, only when I'm presented with the desktop or leave that menu.

This may be coincidence but Hardware Acceleration has had its issues too at the same time. Discord started flickering and showing things off-place, meanwhile Edge showed green bars on videos while skipping. Turning GPU scheduling off seemed to fix the flickers, until I woke the PC from hibernation the next day.
Turning HA off fixed those issues and on Edge changing DX11 on 12 to DX11 and toggling it on again fixed it and Discord was fine with it on after I turned fast VSync off and triple buffering on.

Like, today I opened CS and I saw flickering for the first time but CTRL+ALT+DEL stopped that each time and yesterday I did a multitude of tasks without any flickering for hours without anything abnormal, just like when I did the latest Windows 10 update, it just stopped until it woke from hibernation/sleep.

Everything seems so random and sometimes it fully stops, it makes me question if it's actually the display :/ I'll try it whenever possible with another PC, in the meantime I'll disable display suspension.

Edit: I disabled "turn off the display" in the power options, it still turns them off after a while due to the legacy "screen saver" option as seen here:

https://imgur.com/a/04heHmw

And for an entire day it stopped but after waking it from hibernation it started again...And I did see very tiny flickers at the very bottom of the lock screen.