Screens freezing, turning black and/or showing blue lines

[danduh]

Wall of text, TL;DR at the bottom
Hi there,

for the past month I've encountered a persistent, but random issue: Both my screens were randomly freezing, plus a loud buzzing from the looped last sound. The remainder of components seemed to run normally (fan didn't change). Obviously I couldn't do anything but restart the PC manually. Afterwards I had to restart it multiple times because the displays didn't receive a signal. It happened like this most of the time and sometimes once a week, up to multiple times a day.

As for my specs (relevant ones):
- GTX 670
- i7-3770
- 2 BenQ GL 2450 monitors (the DVI version)
- some ASUS motherboard
- 2x4 GB Corsair RAM
- be quiet SYSTEM POWER 7 700W
- Scythe Katana

When I opened the case, I noticed that one of the RAM sticks was kind of bent to the side, since the cooler is too wide and the RAM isn't low profile.

I've put it into the second slot temporarily.

For the temperature everything seems to be fine, I could even check it right before it froze, was about 60°C iirc.

A few days ago a friend gave me his 680. An hour or so after being built in, the screen went black this time. When I restarted it, there were weird blue vertical lines around the ASUS logo, and later different ones around the Windows logo.

After the ASUS logo there were plenty of '¢' signs (nothing else), where normally text is displayed.

It doesn't go past the Windows logo, the screens just go black every time.

Now I'm wondering which part might be faulty... some user here in another thread suggested that it might be the display connectors or the monitors themselves. Both would be wondrous to me since the displays are equally old (new) and the chance of both of them or the cables having some issues at the same time seems very unlikely.

So my question is which parts could cause an issue like that?

TL;DR: Screens of both monitors randomly freeze OR turn black and show blue vertical lines on restart depending on graphics card. Any clue appreciated.

 

[Lutfij]

First and foremost you need to resolve the issue with your ram by using the stock cooler and with the ram sin their appropriate slot(according to your motherboard manual) see if the artifacting takes place. Yes the squiggly lines across your screen are due to graphics card artifacting and can be either a bad GPU, bad drivers for it or that the rams are giving out.

Have you made sure your BIOS is up to date before you decided to go onto Windows 10? Pardon me if I'm wrong since you didn't state the OS nor the model for your motherboard. The ram look like a Corsair Vengeance ram kit. On that note, can you get into BIOS without experiencing any artifacting?

 

[danduh]

Thanks for replying after such a long time!

When the issue was still around, I cleaned all parts, switched my RAM sticks to Single channel (they're on 1 2 now instead of 1 3. Not the best solution, I know, but at least now they're not bent anymore) and switched the 680 back to my 670.
[strike]For the time being (almost 2 months now) the problem hasn't even come up once.[/strike]
Actually it just happened when I was typing this on my phone... speak of the devil.


If it happens again I'll make sure to update the BIOS.