Second monitor freezing

This is a very new issue, and I'm not really sure what's going on. I'm hoping someone out there has had the same issue and fixed it or has some ideas. So I have a laptop with Pop!_OS and a pretty old (8ish years) second monitor attached via HDMI to DisplayPort.

Whenever the PC is loading something resource intensive, there's a chance that the second monitor will freeze. It seems to have something to do with alt-tabbing while the computer is loading something, but I'm not entirely sure.

What I've tried is:

• changing my graphics settings to various things, updating graphics drivers (I'm using nvidia-driver-535 which is the most recent, however, I've tried other drivers as well).
• reducing display settings like lower refresh rates, lower resolution, etc

I'm not really sure what else to try. The weird thing is that whenever the monitor freezes up, adjusting the refresh rate in Pop!_OS settings will fix it.

Also, possibly related but weird, sometimes, but not always, when I set the refresh rate to 144hz then my monitor will say "OUT OF RANGE" but as I said, I've had this monitor for 8ish years and it's never done this before. Is it possibly just that my monitor is on the way out?