I made a memtest drive and will run it as soon as I need to restart again, which might be soon because I’m starting to see more artifacting again.

Edit: Had a hard freeze and had to restart. The memtest passed with no errors.

I reinstalled the 550 driver and added that line in nvidia.conf. I will restart and see how it goes. I suppose I could set up a temporary dual boot and test it in windows. This all started as soon as I first started trying to get linux working on this pc, though. Prior to that it had been running windows since I got it. The temperature readings all seem fine, too. That being said I think the next thing I try is to replace the thermal paste and if that doesn’t work I’ll dig up my windows installation media and see how that goes. Someone in a previous thread suggested my psu might be going out, which would make sense because its the only original part other than the cd drive at this point, so I think that might be my next try if nothing free works.

Edit: I got a black screen on the first restart, got to log in and then went to a black screen with a working cursor on the second and third restarts, then it seemed to be working fine, until mostly everything went black except some of spotify and keepass and white squares were flashing everywhere for about 30 seconds and then it stopped. Everything is working as normal now for the time being.

Edit 2: Just played Elden ring for a few minutes, the game crashed pretty quickly, but not immediately and nothing else crashed. Still planning to do the memtest at next full crash.

Edit3: had a hard freeze and ran the memtest when I had to restart. It passed.

I managed to check the output of that command and switch back to nouveau before it froze this time. The mouse is still operable but you can see the artifacting I’ve been getting. It looks like I am on x11 as my three options at start are Cinnamon (Default), Cinnamon (Software Rendering), and Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental). I am about to try Wayland just to see.

I haven’t checked the thermal paste, I think I have some lying around. I have periodically been checking the temperature at 2 second intervals in the terminal off to the side and it seems to freeze up regardless of what temp it was at. I will open up and replace it because it couldn’t hurt. I will update if that helps.

I’ll have some time in the morning to mess with it and I will post those results.

I just went in and checked and it looks like it is already off. Out of curiosity, I tried turning on profile one (froze at login, which is what happened after the most recent reboot) and two (froze on black screen before login).

I had some time and updated my bios, then switched over to the 550 driver from the driver manager and upon restart I had the phantom monitor issue which seems to have been fixed by following this post. its only been a few minutes and I haven’t done anything with it yet, so I will update if any more issues come up but I’m feeling hopeful.

Edit: literally the second after posting this reply I got a freeze trying to open steam…

I’ll give that a shot this weekend and see if that ends up fixing the issue! Thanks!