Need some advice - Snowing screen/Black Screen

[GateKeeper]

Hi people,

Quick summary of my setup:

AMD Ryzen 3600
RTX 2060
GIGABYTE B450 AORUS ELITE
1 NVME and]
1 SSD

I currently have 2 monitors connected to my PC.
The primary monitor is hooked up with DVI-D and the secondary is running HDMI. I wouldve preferred it the other way around, but due to my work laptop setup, this is the only config I can run it in at the moment.

Anyway, this has been working fine for years now, and quite recently started acting up....

I have 2 issues:

Issue 1: When playing any games, and simultaneously having a video playing(YouTube, streaming on Discord etc) - either on the 2ndary monitor or in the background on the primary monitor - The screen would randomly turn to complete SNOW. I still have audio, but cant see anything. It would be like one of my childhood tvs that doesnt have an antenna connected. While this is happening, my 2ndary monitor is still working fine. I can do stuff on it.

I have now recently found that resetting the graphics driver a few times with: Win+Ctrl+Shift+B. Brings my display back and I can continue playing games, but it still happens quite often. For note, this happens with all games - unlike Issue 2 below.

* I would note here, that checking event viewer does not reveal anything. I see no errors occurring - Nothing.

Issue 2:
When playing games like Valheim, my monitors just goes to black and I hear my pc fans ramping up. This happens randomly, so I could play fine for 1 hour today. But tomorrow Ill log into the game and then it happens. Whats weird is, when this happens, I still have sound. I can still hear friends talking in discord and they can still hear me. Utlimately, the only way to fix this is to hard reboot the pc.

This issue is much older than issue 1 above. So I have extensively troubleshooted this...
* Event viewer reports no issues
* Based on previous searches, people have suggested the power supply or the GPU might be failing.
* I replaced the powersupply - no change
* I still have the same GPU, but I find it weird that a GPU would fail on a game like Valheim and subsequently play with no issues on other games running at max settings.
* I have used HWInfo to log the sensors, to determine if any voltage drops or increase occur at the time of failure - nothing.
* I have logged temps on the GPU to see if this is spiking randomly - Nothing
* I have done a fresh install of Windows numerous times. I have tried both Windows 10 and 11.
* I have switched my game files to different drives to see if that changes anything - Nothing

Anyone else experience similar behavior or have solved the same behavior previously. Really any assistance would be helpful at this point.

 

[DaneM]

Heya,
Have you tried to roll back graphics drivers?

 

[DaneM]

If I were you start by eliminating the easiest stuff.
If I were called in to handle that I would do the following:
1st Id try new cables, if problem persists I would remove and plug cables back in again, sometimes it just doesn't detect the connection properly and gets stuck in an error loop. Then I'd try see if it were the monitor causing the issue. Do you have a spare monitor - or even just your TV? If problem keeps happening on new monitor that's when i would take a look at the GPU itself. Most people don't have a spare GPU to test so let's isolate the possible problem first being maybe a graphics driver issue, if not which it probably wont be because of the multiple reinstalls. So make a bootable Linux Ubuntu drive and do a GPU stress test, see if that does it. If not then I'd look at Mobo. After that It's a guessing game....