GPU will no longer be recognized or send signal to my screen, please help me

[RealDialSama]

Hello, good day/afternoon/night to all of you. I'm new here but I really need some help here.

I've had this PC for about 2 1/2 years now, and it was really awesome most of the time. It could handle most games I threw at it no problem and design apps ran very smoothly, it's NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 GPU being potent enough for most if not all of my requirements.

Right now though, the GPU went silent all of a sudden, with no warning other than a few occasional lockups. I was playing Halo Anniversary (from The Master Chief Collection) two days ago, when another lockup occurred. It made my screen go entirely black (most of the times the image simply froze), but to my amazement now that it's not responding or being recognized, the audio also went dark!

I mean, the game stopped sending sound to my speakers as well, which tells me it was a lockup and not a video fault per se. At the time, I simply hard turned off the PC (holding the power button down) and went take a shower and sleep (should I maybe turned it on and waited for it to cool off? I really did not think of that at the moment). In the morning however, the PC was not displaying any video or image. I got kind of scared, but managed to switch from the HDMI GPU port to the MoBo port, which did successfully allow me to boot into Windows (where I am now). The computer boots, but the dGPU does not, only the iGPU.

After trying to start the NVIDIA GeForce Experience software, the Control Panel and even trying to run some games and see what GPU was being used, I was able to confirm the dedicated GPU is offline, and only the integrated one is functional at the moment. This leads me to ask (as I am out of warranty and the support reps can't help me):

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                                   What can I do? What tests or diagnostics can I take at this point? I went and unplugged the GPU (by removing a big metal place-holder it had over it which was screwed and clipped onto other case pieces), cleaned it off of dust cumulus and plugged it back in, in the hopes the dust had made it stop responding or even that it had got lose somehow, but it remained silent.

Right now I have a GPU with a fan that's running normally, but that however sends no signal to my screen or is recognized in Windows 10 whatsoever;

...has anyone experienced such issues before??? What does this mean, is my GPU EXPIRED or past it's time? Is it DAMAGED beyond repair? Should I replace it, or can it be fixed somehow? All and any help will be greatly appreciated, especially now that GPU prices are through the roof and, well, I did kind of love my GTX 970. =(

Thanks, blessings from on High onto all who read me, have a wonderful rest of your day! 😃

PS: You can reach me here or on [personal info removed], or even on WhatsApp or Telegram if that suits you better: +584123379350. Again, thanks a ton.

[TheOldMan]

The most probable cause is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970   has failed.  I suspect there is no one that tries to repair graphics cards, but with the state of things nowadays, there may be some, who knows.  I suspect the card needs to be replaced.  Remove the failed card and run with the onboard graphics for awhile just to verify that everything else is working properly.  After verifying there are no other problems and If you were satisfied with the card performance, which it sounds as though you were, try to find a replacement. 

It would seem there are plenty of used ones on EBay but if that goes against your grain, then new NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 are almost $700. US.

The  Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti is a comparible alternative but about the same price new.  The Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 is a slight upgrade.