Laptop freezes regularly. Graphics card suspected

Hi,

My laptop (HP EliteBook 8540w) freezes about once a day. When it does I have to use REISUB (very seldom I can log out with Ctrl-Alt-Delete). It happens in openSUSE and Fedora 25. When in Windows 7 it does not freeze but sometimes I get a notification that the graphic card was restarted.

I’ve read online that this laptop is very prone to overheating. The laptop does get quite hot to the touch. This is not a new problem: Last year I bought some external fans to help cooling. I’ve been using the laptop with cpupower set to the lowest governor.

I also tried switching drivers from nouveau to nvidia. It freezes less (from multiple times a day to once or none).

This morning, however, after being off for the entire night, I booted it up and it froze when it got to the GUI. The laptop was still cold… I think the graphics card is damaged for good. Any ideas?

Well the nasty thing with graphics cards is that they can seem to work, whilst they are already broken. But, before we draw this conclusion, which desktop environment are you using ?