I've posed this question on different forums and have always gotten different answers, so I guess I'll try it here. So I have a GTX 970 that worked fine when I first got it. After maybe 2 months, it had it's first crash. I didn't think anything of it, thought it was some driver instability of something and assumed as I got updated drivers, it would fix itself. Now, many months later, it has only gotten worse. The crashes come at random. While gaming, I can sometimes play for an hour or two before it crashes. Other times it crashes every 15 to 30 minutes, other times still, it crashes while not even playing a game (like on Youtube or sometimes just sitting at my desktop).
The crashes also seem to be different. While gaming, it'll sometimes crash to the desktop and tell me that the game has stopped responding, while the game is still "running", frozen in the background. Sometimes, it'll crash to the desktop, close the game, report no errors, and act like nothing happened. Sometimes it'll freeze the entire system, forcing me to manually shut off the computer. However with all crashes (except freezing the whole computer), my monitor reports having no signal for a second or two before the GPU recovers.
I'm running Afterburner, and nothing looks particularly off or bad when the crashes happen. Temperature never goes above 68, there's no spikes in any power or anything, everything looks level and normal. Driver updates and rollbacks have no effect either.
Windows 10
AMD A10-7700k Radeon R7 3.4ghz
8gb DDR3 RAM
GeForce GTX 970 4gb
EVGA SuperNova 1000W
I'm trying to determine whether or not it is the GPU that needs to be replaced or something else that is causing the problem. Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance!