PC screen suddenly goes white and unresponsive

Posted by thatAnthrax@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Hello everyone,

Not so long ago (6 months) I bought a secondhand PC from someone. It has been running well for the past 6 months, but last month, my PC's screen suddenly goes to white when I left it in idle for a long time (7 hours or so). It was unresponsive, and I had to manually hold the power button until the PC shuts down. That was a one-time thing back then.

Fast forward to today, I was playing a game (CSGO) and it happened again. I was in a middle of a competitive match, and I tried to hop back into the server. Not even after 5 minutes of running CS, the same thing happened again. When the screen goes white, any keyboard or mouse input didn't work (Ctrl+Alt+Del or mouse cursor movement), and if it happens while a sound is playing, it still plays normally for a few seconds, then it becomes distorted and static, and the sound stops.

I tried running a benchmarker (Unigine Heaven) and while in the middle of the benchmark process, the screen now turns red and my PC became unresponsive again (at that time, the GPU temp shown in the benchmarking app is just 71°C).

So I tried restating again, and this time, the problem happens when I'm opening MS Edge (screen color is now orange, but everything else was the same). I then tried hopping into a deathmatch server in CSGO a few times, and it happened consistently (sometimes the screen color differs, like grey, orange, red, or white)

Do you guys know what's wrong with this PC? I'm really confused because there was no error code or anything, so troubleshooting is very hard. I'm assuming this is a hardware issue because something is failing? Because it was fine for some time before.

Few things I've tried:

  1. Updating my graphics driver (NVIDIA Game Ready Driver from their GeForce Experience program)
  2. Pressing Win+Ctrl+Shift+B to reset graphics driver
  3. Reseating GPU, RAM, and CMOS battery
  4. Running sfc /scannow in elevated CMD
  5. Check for windows updates

PC Specs:
Motherboard: Gigabyte B250M-D2V
CPU: Intel i5 7600k
GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 1070 GAMING X 8G
RAM: Corsair Vengeance DDR4 2133MHz 2x8GB
PSU: Corsair CX550M
OS: Windows 10 Pro 22H2