Otis Kew

Hi All, I have been having display issues lately with my PC (sometimes I turn it on and I get not display), which I solved by the good ol turn it off and on again trick. However, since I bought a seccond monitor I have been having a bunch of issues of screen freezes randomly, sometimes no display when I turned the PC on and the PC randomly restarting itself with no blue screen. Things have now escalated to the point where if I plug even only one display into my GPU (HDMI or Display Port) I get no display when I turn my PC on regardless of what monitor I use or which cable I use. I now have my monitor plugged int my PC viz HDMI to the motherboard (i.e. not plugged into the graphics card ports) and I get a display, but when I check Nvidia scanner and my task manager, I am getting no indication that my GPU exists. I tried updating to the latest GTX 970 driver, but when I tried to install it I got a message saying that there was no compatible hardware detected AND that it was incompatible with windows. There are no new windows updates I can install. The GPU fan is spinning when the PC is turned on so there is power going to at least the fan, and I cant find any issues with the power via software checks. I am going to unplug my PC and check that the connection cables haven't come loose for the GPU in case its as simple as that (there's no reason that should have happened, no bumps and haven't moved it lately etc.) What I want to know is, what else should I do before I take it to a repair place/ replace the GPU. I don't have another PC to test the GPU or any other component, and my laptop is also broken so if I take it to a repair store I'll be without a computer for however long they take to repair it. So what are the obvious self repair things I can do beyond what I've already done to isolate what I can? Here's the relevant system info I can think of, copy pasted from the System Information app OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Pro Version 10.0.18362 Build 18362 Platform Role Desktop Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3770K CPU @ 3.50GHz, 3501 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) BaseBoard Product Z77 Extreme4 Cheers, Otis K