Asus z70va screen going crazy

Hey everyone,

My z70va started having some pretty alarming problems today when I was trying to work on it. I bought it about 2 years ago. What happens is that everything is running fine, then all of the sudden the screen goes into a sort of checkered pixelation and seems to freeze. I have to hold the power button to restart it.

Sometimes when I restart it from this problem, it boots fine (then proceeds to have the problem again). But then other times, it boots into the dos prompt with the messed up checkered display, or sometimes it seems to boot into windows, and seems to go insane with the screen ghosting effect that some z70vas (like mine) had at the time when I bought it, but the whole screen starts ghosting different colors and I can see the outline of the start button and some icons.

I'm not sure whether it's a problem with the software or it just has to do with the display. Could it be heat? It runs pretty hot sometimes. But then the erratic behavior (like how sometimes it runs and displays things just fine) makes me think it might be a software thing.

Has anyone else encountered anything like this?

I've attached a couple pictures from my camera phone to show the checkered effect

 

Possible causes:
A) Overheating. What is the temp of your GPU? Have you cleaned the dust from the CPU/GPU fan and heatsink lately? If not, you should do it.


B) GPU Driver issues. Use different driver or to be on the safe side do a clean Windows install.

C) GPU gone bad. Try first A), B)