after a full day of no crashes & even failing to trigger one by stressing the gpu (3d benchmark + streaming video + many browser tabs at the same time) it again randomly happened while web browsing tonight... but it actually recovered (w/display drivers disabled) without a sleep/wake cycle this time
@lion do you want a free gtx 1050
@mavica_again i think no thanks
whatever i end up getting i want it to last a while so i'm gonna try to get something like.. recent mid-range i guess. i have not done much research on it yet
thanks for the offer though
@lion Weird.
@lion You joke but you probably won't need to.
argh this is so frustrating to debug, it happens so rarely and unpredictably
it's PROBABLY the igpu & hopefully the drivers but it COULD be a HW fault but it's so hard to confirm
i could just bite the bullet & buy a dedicated gpu (which i was gonna do eventually) & sweep all this under the rug.....