MP 1,1-5,1 Mac suddenly slowed down, beach balled, and the screen went all weird colors

[Sossity]

Greetings, all, my desktop 5,1 went a bit crazy, and the screen suddenly went all weird colors, and I got a beach ball, and I could not click on anything.

So I had to do a hard power down, and then after about a minute, started it up again. It seems ok, but I get an occasional screen flicker.

I ran disk utility on it, and it said it was ok. Diskdrill shows the drive as 94% health level.

 

[tsialex]

Maybe a dying GPU? Install another GPU and check, sometimes you will also need to do a clean install on another disk - I had macOS installs corrupted after GPU problems/hard shutdowns.

 

[Sossity]

OK, forgot, the GPU is the graphics right? are there any utilities that can check the GPU?

Luckily, I just bought a new Raedon RX 460 for the computer, so it looks like it might be time to install it. Are there instructions on how to do this?

Would adding any more ram would help? right now it has 3; 8 GB sticks installed. I am a heavy user of Chrome, with multiple accounts and tabs open.

I am also running a time machine backup too.

 

[tsialex]

OK, forgot, the GPU is the graphics right? are there any utilities that can check the GPU?

GPUs are too complex and have a lot of different failure modes. For AppleOEM GPUs, AHT/ASD do very basic checks.

Luckily, I just bought a new Raedon RX 460 for the computer, so it looks like it might be time to install it. Are there instructions on how to do this?

Use the search, see what people recommends for your GPU model.

Would adding any more ram would help? right now it has 3; 8 GB sticks installed. I am a heavy user of Chrome, with multiple accounts and tabs open.

24 GB of RAM is a reasonably decent size, but you really have to check the memory pressure with Activity Monitor.

Adding more RAM when you are not using it is just a waste of money/electricity.

Said that, even if your apps don't really use all the RAM avaliable, macOS can use it as a read-ahead/file system cache and it's very beneficial performance wise, obviously up to a certain point.

I am also running a time machine backup too.

Test with a clean install without restoring TM, after you are sure your Mac works fine, you can do a reinstall and restore your TM backup. Don't skip steps, usually you will loose a lot more time down the road.