when you cleaned the pc did you remove the gpu heatsink and give it a really good clean?, during this stage did you look at the thermal paste on the core, if it looks like its dried up then the core may be overheating even at idle speeds the 780's boost algorithm works diffently to newer gen cards.
check the ram thermal pads as if they have dried up that will cause the ram to overheat, (but if the pads are dry then the damage may already have been done)
causing wierd glitching even at idle speeds.
failing all of the above try rolling back your drives i know nvidia does relase drivers that work for current gen gpu's but getting them to work on older cards can be very hard and can lead to all sorts of problems, which may make you think oh crap my card is dying when its just the updated driver.
In the event that the older driver roll back doesnt work then you card may very well be on the way out so look at a replacment soon before it does die
I cleaned it using a air duster, it was very dusty so i just sprayed the contained air to remove dust all over the GPU/Motherboard and in the case. I didn't actually remove any parts, just opened the case up and air dusted it as much as i could. I am not familiar with GPU heatsink or RAM/Core Thermal paste, i'm assuming you mean the processor when you say "core"? wasn't aware the processor had thermal paste on it. I will tomorrow open up my pc and look at some videos today to see how i can disconnect/remove the GPU and see if i'm able to locate and find out if the thermal paste on the core is dried up, same for the ram thermal pads. Will be difficult as i'm not familiar with custom builds or how to remove/add them but i can learn quickly and see if the drying up is true or not. If the ram thermal pads are dried up, that's fine i suppose as i will then have located the issue and can replace it and move. Ram is much cheaper than GPU's so that's why i guess better than nothing. As for the drivers, i was having this issue while having an old stable driver version installed that i've been using for quite some time. I even installed new version and the issue continued and then uninstalling it, somehow an older version 399 was installed when i checked device manager, it must have reverted back to that i think when the installation didn't install/uninstall correctly when i rebooted as i got the black screen because i didn't uninstall in safe mode and did it manually instead of DDU. You can only go a certain amount of back for drivers, i've installed some that were released months ago and no difference. Before i make arrangements to get an ew GPU, i want to make sure it's actually the GPU and not my ram/core actually failing aswell. There may even be power issues as none of the parts have been replaced since i bought them 5 years ago. Thanks for your advice, i will open it up and try see the things you listed tomorrow after youtube videos. I have a brand new evga 1080ti that i can use but first need to confirm the issue and i'm not even sure if the 1080ti fits in my case or is compatible with my parts.