Monitor went black mid-game 😁 — what now?

So, I was right in the middle of gaming when my monitor just went black—like, the picture totally vanished. The game audio is still playing fine, my hard drive is making its usual clicking sounds, and all the fans are spinning up without any issues. When I tried restarting, I could see the BIOS splash screen for a moment, and then once Windows 7 loaded, the mouse pointer flickered on for about a second before everything went dark again. Even when I try booting into Safe Mode, I can't see a thing. 😁 My setup is an older build with a Gigabyte motherboard, a GeForce 660, running Windows 7, and the tower itself is probably about 8 years old now. Any help would be appreciated. Right now, I’m thinking maybe I should tear the whole thing apart and blow out the dust, though I have a feeling that might not actually fix this.

If you've got integrated graphics on your motherboard, try plugging into that instead. Just head into your BIOS settings and toggle it on (you'll probably want to disable the GeForce card since it looks like it's finally kicked the bucket).

That actually happened to me once too, though my GPU was totally fine. I had my motherboard sent off for repair and they initially suspected the graphics card. They tried swapping in a different one, but nothing changed. Turns out, it was a faulty motherboard due to a manufacturing defect. Since it was still under warranty, they just swapped the whole board out for a new one, and everything’s been running perfectly since then.