Strange Graphical Glitch on One Monitor Causing PC Freezes

Jayden933 · October 25, 2018

I've been experiencing a bizarre issue. I have three monitors. One G-Sync 1440p165Hz, a secondary 1080p60 on the left, and a vertical tertiary 1080p60 on the right, all plugged into separate ports of a GTX 1080. Over the past few weeks, I've been having issues regarding only the right monitor. When the computer idles and goes to sleep (turning the displays off but not locking), sometimes when I come back and move the mouse to wake it up, the right monitor will have strange artifacting effect like the lines are offset back and forth or something. See the example photos of MSI afterburner and my Steam library on the affected monitor. http://imgur.com/gallery/YHoNyhH

You can still move things back and forth to it and sort of make out what's on the screen, but it's definitely an issue. Now here are the oddities I've encountered that really make this a problem:

If I turn off, unplug, or change the display adapter properties of the affected monitor after it's glitched, my entire PC locks up and freezes, completely unusable without a hard shut down. I did this once with a video open and the sound continued until the video ended, so it seems to still be operating in the background, but all of the screens and input are completely frozen.

I have a Steam Link connected to my TV. If I use the Steam Link and connect to my PC after the monitor has glitched, when I navigate the mouse over to the affected monitor on the Steam Link, the graphical glitch is still visible even on the TV (leading me to believe it's not an issue specifically with the monitor) and my mouse is then locked onto that screen and I can't mouse back off of it without turning the Steam Link off.

And last, if I connect to my PC from my phone via TeamViewer after the monitor has glitched, whenever I toggle the view over to the affected monitor, I immediately lose connection to the PC and have to reconnect.

If I come back and wake the computer to find that the monitor has glitched, and then I let it idle and sleep again, and then wake it once more, instead of all the monitors coming back on, they all remain black and my speakers start beeping, forcing a hard shut down.

The only way I've found to fix the issue after it's started is to simply restart the PC without unplugging or turning off any monitor, and it will reboot just fine.

The only thing I could think of is that it's a GPU issue. The only problem with that though, is that my GPU has been performing more than admirably everywhere else. I have zero issues playing demanding games at high framerates, multitasking and using windows across monitors, and even in benchmarking and stress tests. This graphical issue has persisted through 2 or 3 GPU driver updates. And the issue has never occurred while I'm actively using the PC, only like 3 out of 4 times when it wakes from sleep.

The only other hardware change of any kind recently is that I had an old 3TB hard drive used for game storage fail, but it was removed 2 or 3 weeks before this started happening.

Any help or advice is much appreciated.

Brooksie359 · October 25, 2018

I have a similar issue but not quite as bad. Sometimes when I turn on my computer the post screen will flash and go for a little bit while it posts then the windows screen will come up for a second and then all screens go black. I have to do a hard reset to get it to boot up properly. Didn't have this issue until somewhat recently as well.