My Experience with Xid 79 GPU has fallen off the bus

[cpt_mocha]

I have a GTX 1060 card on an ASrock motherboard with Core i7 processor. This is a fairly powerful desktop build from about 2 years ago. Over the past couple years I would sometimes get the Xid 79 error where I would come home and the the video card would just be randomly locked up, but the system was still running fine. I could ssh in and the system was still up and running. The only way to recover was to reboot via the command line via ssh. After a long time I finally stumbled upon the reason for these intermittent problems. I have two monitors connected to the GTX 1060. The display port out goes to an Asus monitor. The HDMI out goes to a LCD television through an HDMI switch. The television is also connected to a local digital cable TV provider through their converter box. There must be some grounding or voltage transient problem here. I discovered by accident that when I unplugged the wall wart for the cable box I can consistently trigger the Xid 79! I also discovered that if I unplug the HDMI from the switch then I can unplug the cable box all day and there’s no problems. So obviously there is some kind of voltage transient occurring over the return side of the HDMI cable to the GTX 1060. Once in a while the cable box would reboot itself when it gets an update, so that must be what causes the intermittent Xid 79. The only solution I can see right now is to just keep the HDMI unplugged from the switch when I’m not using it. It might be the cable itself, unfortunately this is a 12 foot cable and I don’t have another to try. It’s possible the length is also a factor, I’m not sure!