RIP my iMac

So my workstation that I've had since 2014 (it's a 2011 model I got used) is very quickly deteriorating. It started Thursday night/Friday morning. It seems like a graphics card/GPU issue. I tried hooking up an external monitor hoping it was just the display and it's definitely something more complicated than that. Oof. It'll work intermittently then the screen will screw up. I think everything else is functioning fine even as the screen locks up which is very frustrating. I was gonna take it to a local repair place but I'm pretty sure I know what's wrong. Options seem to be: -replace GPU -see if an external GPU is compatible with this old-ass iMac -dissassemble it and bake the graphics card in the oven (seriously lol) -buy a new apple machine -finally build my own PC I have other options to try too before going nuclear but it seems like it will come down to one of those. And I feel like thanks to Bitcoin weirdos any fix would likely be so expensive that I should just build a comparable PC for the price. Fortunately for me I didn't have much important stuff just on my iMac and I was able to back up everything that matters to me pretty quickly. So now it's just like hmm, what do I do. I was going to do a quick review video of the video game North just to have something done but I spent all day backing up old photos and googling iMac issues and whatever instead. If anyone has advice or insight (or a connection at Apple- they replaced the graphics cards in these models for free but quit the program in like 2014, RIP, though some people online claim to have gotten replacements more recently...) then hit me up. I'm fairly tech-savvy but am far from an expert when it comes to hardware and these sorts of problems. I have a 2009 dell laptop that is physically falling apart with Vegas on it which could be used as a miserable interim solution to save up money for a new machine and I know a couple other people whose machines I could maybe use temporarily. So you might be seeing more short videos in April. I dunno. I guess it's good this didn't happen right before I had some huge project out but it's still upsetting and frustrating. Shannon