Artifacts on screen - Nvidia 384.9x Driver

Hello friends,

I am running Nvidia Prime setup on Centos 7.4 on Dell Inspiron 7559 (UHD monitor + GTX960M) on 384.98 drivers and few days ago strange artifacts started to appear on my screen after getting to X server. (They are not present in grub/bios.)

This is photo of the artifact:

And here is visualization (I just drew it in Krita to show how it looks like):

They are mostly static, but when I start to move windows they are twinkling a little bit.

Usually when I restart GDM or change resolution of the screen the artifacts disappear, but they always appear again after restarting the computer.

When I take screenshot of the screen, the artifacts are not present on the picture. First I thought that it is problem of my system. So I installed Ubuntu LTS 16.04 with NVidia-prime and 384.90 drivers, but I got the exact same artifacts, but on another place on the screen. Then I tried to install latest 387 drivers on Ubuntu, and the problem is gone, no artifacts are present - Thats why I think that it is problem of the current drivers, but maybe it is hardware fault. I am not sure.

Here is bug report log:

https://we.tl/iipzqVzj8k

Please could you help me to solve this problem?

Thank you very much and have a nice day
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (156 KB)

This might be a sign of a hardware failure (faulty memory, GPU, overclocking, thermals).

Hello, today I tried to install 387.34 drivers on my Centos 7.4 laptop. After restart the artifacts are still present, but on another place, they moved circa 5 centimeters to the left. I also noticed one thing: When I move mouse cursor over the artifacts, they are covered by the cursor (and not visible anymore). But when I open some windows, the artifacts are on top of them… So I think that this problems happens “somewhere between” mouse cursor and windows in X11. Do you think it is a software or hardware problem? If hardware should I contact the hardware manufacturer?

Please if you had some ideas what could be the problem I would be extremely thankful.

If you need any more information just let me know.

Thank you very much and have a nice day

Hello birdie, thank you very much for your answer. I did not overclock the GPU but now I also think that it is a hardware problem. Please do you know of some way how to confirm if it is hardware related? Self-diagnostic tests in laptop BIOS don’t show any problems. Please do you know of some utility or software how can I find out what is the cause of the problem?