This has happened 3 times in the past 2 days, any advice? It goes away after reboots but always comes back.
Update: So it could be GPU death, how exciting, especially for a 1.5 year old laptop. As of now it hasn’t terribly affected my workflow, but if this persists even after future kernel/driver updates, it may be rip. I am still hopeful that it could be software related, but time will tell!
This one is a little more interesting
Update 2: I was using Windows for testing purposes, and it happened again! This was immediately after picking the laptop up, so it is definitely hardware related. This time it made a horrible noise as well, answering some of the questions. So somehow by picking the device up, maybe the internals are slightly bent, causing the issues?
Laptop GPUs are often connected using a ball grid array, which means that there aren’t any pins and they just use a ball of solder to make the connection. If the laptop overheats enough, some of the solder may melt and move causing such issues.
The heat to melt solder is well above the heat made by the cores in normal operation. It’s more likely that the balls crack under stress in the heat/cooling cycles. (Also if the ball is at such a high temp, the core is likely way way higher, and that would damage the core)
This happened to my laptop that I had a long time ago. I found a guide where I took out the motherboard, wrapped it in foil except where the GPU was, then used a blow dryer to heat the solder connecting the GPU to the mobo. Worked for another six months, then it happened again, so I replaced the system.