Earlier today I was in the middle of a game (Sims 4, not exactly graphics intensive) and my screen suddenly went grey with many vertical lines. Here is a picture:
I had spotify on in the background which kept playing, however I was unable to do anything on the computer, no response to ctrl alt del or anything, so I had force shut down.
After doing this, my computer as it booted, had these strange red lines as seen here:
After many attempts of booting and trying different things the lines are now solid red like this:
In any case, once I get past boot and to where the computer normally starts log in, I get again a screen full of veticle lines. Usually they are green like this:
I have tried many thing and did manage to log in to the computer in safe mode and suddenly there were no lines. When I restarted after than I manage to log in properly and see my desktop, but after about 15 minutes the screen just spazzed out and went all glitchy (screen image was cut in half and on the wrong side) and then again the verticle lines appeared and I had to force shut down. I then AGAIN went into safe mode to have a look at my display drivers and this time the red lines persisted till log in and while I was working in safe mode. I cant tell if the lines are red really or if they are just inversing colors?
I have been doing many searched for hours and trying to figure out what the problem could be. I tried different RAM, tried a different screen, different HDMI wire, tried turning off any overclocking on the GPU, completly cleaned up the inside of the computer and reapplied thermal paste to areas that needed it, did a system restore back to 4 days ago, tried the boot up repair, tried slotting the graphics card into the other PC-E slot. None of this has helped.
What I am wondering is what sort of problem this is? Lately I feel like my computer has been getting pretty hot, even when I'm not doing much, but VERY much so when playing games, no idea if this is related.. Is this likely a hardware issue (if so what could be the cause?? I can't really afford to just trial and error with replacing all parts), might it be an issue with a recent Windows update, could it be a driver issue? I think everything I have is up to date, I did a factory reset of my computer 2 months ago and updated everything then and it was working beautifully for a while.
For reference here are my computer specs:
Windows 10 Home Edition
AMD Athlon/Phenom II - AM3
500 GB SATA-II HDD 7200 16MB
Asus TA-8J1, Black Midi, Tower Case
Asus M4N75TD (NVIDIA 750a)
Cooler Master 750W PSU
ATI Radeon HD 6870 - 1 GB - (VTX) (PCI-E)
AMD Phenom II X6 1045T (6 x 2.7 GHz) 6MB
AMD Entertainment 4GB XMS3 PC3-12800 1600MHz + 2x4 gb some other RAM can't remember the name
Let me know if you need more info, I really hope I can figure this out!
