Horizontal stripes on screen, then blackness

Hi folks,

Could you help solving this?

Yesterday I was gaming as usual, then a few minutes after exiting, my screen suddenly got random noise-coloured horizontal stripes on it and all the screen elements were kinda half-misplaced horizontally (as if every 2nd pixel line was shifted), and after a minute or so it all went white. I think one of my fans might have been emitting some unusual noise when the error first occurred, but that might have been the usual increased activity due to gaming.

When I restarted my computer, the blue Win7 loading screen already showed the stripes, and after the loading screen showed that fade--to-black animation when loading the actual Windows UI, it all just went black, and stayed that way. I let it "cool off" overnight, then tried again, with the same result.

Weird thing is, when starting the PC, the DOS-like loading screens don't show these stripes, neither does the black windows loading screen with the animated logo, and when I restart my computer in Safe Mode, it works properly too.

Only thing I can think of that I did recently is that a few weeks ago I cleaned my computer case out with compressed air, but I didn't move the GPU at all then, and have been gaming as usual since then.

Following some other threads on this forum, I tried to reinstall Catalyst Control Center in Safe Mode, but it says it can't detect the existing driver. I can't magick an internet access on the PC under safe mode, so I'm stuck with trying to run these fixes on it via a USB stick. I didn't yet dare to disable or uninstall the GPU driver in case my PC wouldn't even work in safe mode then.

Any ideas?

(PS: I had this PC config since 2011, and it was working all right until now.)

It may be that one of the GPU fans has seized and the card was overheating. Or it may be that the card has just given up and failed. You could try monitoring the GPU temp with something like HWMonitor to see if the card is really overheating.

Has the card worked normally since this happened? I mean not in safe mode. Have you tried gaming since the problem started?

I don't think that changing the graphics drivers would help, at least for right now. Nothing has changed with your setup, and changing the graphics drivers at this point would just introduce another variable in the mix and make it harder to diagnose your problem.