AW3420DW, goes into sleep mode or flickers

Recently bought this monitor which works great for web browsing, email, general computer use.  However, games tend to send the monitor to sleep or randomly flicker or lose signal for a few seconds.  Also, opening MS Word or Excel gets the "lost signal" message and the monitor goes to sleep every time I open them and the only way out is Alt-F4 to close it.

Sometimes when gaming it works to unhook the monitor from the PC and plug it back in and the screen will come back.

I'm running an ASUS laptop with Win 10 Pro.  NVidia 2080 RTX card.  Drivers all up to date.  Connected with HDMI (laptop doesn't have DP though I've ordered a new laptop that does).

I've tried multiple HDMI cables (no change), surfing the net for other options, reducing the display size (no effect), unplugging and resetting the monitor, and turning it off and turning it back on.  Also ran self-diagnostics, which were fine.

Any thoughts?