Random black screen

Hey there,

I've been gaming just fine for a while now. Had the occasional crash but I thought it was to do with heavily modded single player games more than anything.

Just recently, as of 3 days, my crashing has become a bit more intense. I will be playing a game and I will get a black screen. PC still has power, as does monitor, but it will just be black. I can either let it go and it will reboot on its own or I do a hard reboot. Tried for 50 minutes yesterday to play a game, just kept crashing every 5 minutes. I should mention also crashes whilst doing simply desktop tasks and using WORD.

Today I have conducted a stress test using 3DMark's Nomad stress test. All went well for about 10 cycles then kicked the bucket with a black screen.

I'm trying to find a conclusive option to see whether its my RAM or my GFX card. Can anyone offer any suggestions besides MEMtest, which I will be running in the coming hours.

PC Specs:
Ryzen 7 5800X3D
MSI Mag B550 Mortar
32gb RAM
MSI 4080 Ventus 3X - Has been updated to latest drivers.
Windows 11

 

Have you reseated the ram & GPU? What PSU has it got and how old is it?

 

What is the exact model ram you have?
Is it on the motherboard's QVL?

Are you running EXPO on?
If so, does it still crash if you turn EXPO off?

 

There's a windows hot key to stop and restart the graphics driver. Ctrl win shift something

If that works...
Nvidia drivers are having a weird time.

Try rolling back a year or a bit before you remember it starting.
If that resolves it, great.


If not, find mats/mods to test the gpu, and memtest for ram.
If that passes, it could be a lot of things - including your monitor psu, or even the gpu mosfets.
Dropping out is one symptom of gpu mosfets/drivers dying.

 

An update to original post -
-Have reseated the RAM and GPU.

-RAM is Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16 which is on the QVL

-Not using the XMP feature (I'm guessing EXPO is the same as XMP)

-Thanks for the tip about the shortcut for resetting. It's Windows, Control, Shift and B. WIll give it a whirl the next time it fails.

-Ran MEMtest. Froze after 3 minutes. No errors or anything, simply froze. Restarted and ran again and got to 2 hours and 5 minutes then froze, once again no errors listed just frozen.

So it may be that I'm up for some new RAM. But I'll monitor how it goes with the other things mentioned for a little bit before I bite the bullet on new RAM.

Cheers

 

Back the cpu off a couple notches.
Even if it means underclocking.

Why? Memtest should basically run in cache.
It checks the memory, but it shouldn't need code from there.
A hard lock like that suggests the cpu is crashing.

 

I’ll have to try underclocking it then as it’s never been OC’ed.

 

hey I had a similar issue on my sons computer, after doing all the usual testing including swapping devices between two systems the issue was found to be the PSU which had 'melted' the modular connector to the graphics card.
The Modular PCI-e Cable had melted and become stuck connected to the PSU, once I found this issue and did a swap, no issues so far.

 

Well, after monitoring and swapping stuff I can safely say it is my mobo or cpu.

Any reason why either would go bad after a number of years?

 

Name something immortal

 

True. But I would've expected more than 2.5 years... ;(

 

Yeah, bad luck.

Try reseating the chip and everything else you can.

 

My suggestion after reading the thread, once you have ruled out software....

borrow or buy the cheapest used cpu and MB combo, you can daily drive for few months and something that wont lose you a lot of money to flip.

First swap out cpu if it still crashes and swap the MB, but use the combo cpu and mb. If the issue is gone it was the old motherboard.

If it still crashes, replace a different component ie memory, the nvme and the psu one at a time.

Note: in the above senario you are basically building a different pc, once an "old" component is taken out don't use it until you have eliminated the part.

 

Do you have another GPU you could try for a few days?

If stable on replacement GPU, then system is fine. Put back RTX 4080 and if crashes again, then problem could be GPU. Does it have dual BIOS switch on it? If so try the other BIOS and see if stable.

Good luck.

 

Did you try underclocking?

 

Yep, tried underlocking. Still crashes.

Have tested GPU in other system and it's rock solid from what I can tell. So it's definitely the mobo or CPU. Ah well...

 

Could the crashes have coincided with a driver update? Maybe try installing older driver?

 

Drivers don't explain memtest crashing.

You've underclocking the ram too?

Psu is not ruled out yet

 

Yep, underclocked the ram too.

 

Run memtest again