Black Screen, Audio Looping.

[hawtdog]

Hello everyone. I built my PC back in April of last year and only recently has it started this. With more and more frequency. For example, twice tonight.

What will happen is my screen will just go black. The computer itself stays on but the screen itself just black and if I happen to be listening to music or watching something then the last second of the audio will loop as well. I can turn off my computer tower and turn it back on and everything works just fine. No error codes, nothing.

My video card drivers are up to date. I've flashed my bios to the most recent as well.

My CPU normally is around 35-40c and my graphics card is usually running at 39-45c when this happens. I found a similar thread but that person was saying it was happening to them during games, I've actually never had it happen during a game just when browsing sites, watching videos, etc.

Hardware & Specs Below (taken from Speccy)

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i5 4690K @ 3.50GHz 36 °C
RAM: 16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard: MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition (MS-7922) (SOCKET 0)
Monitor: ASUS VS228 (1920x1080@60Hz)
GPU: 4096MB ATI AMD Radeon R9 200 Series (C.P. Technology) - [PowerColor PCS+ Radeon R9 290 to be exact]
HDD: 931GB Seagate ST1000DM003-1ER162 (SATA)
PSU: Antec True Power Classic 750 Watt 80 Plus Gold ATX12V / EPS12V 750 Power Supply TPC-750

If anyone has any advice or wants me to provide any information needed to help troubleshoot the problem I'd highly appreciate it. Thanks!

EDIT: Right after this I did a lot of reading of other forum posts from here and various other forums and following directions trying to troubleshoot this. I saw three tools recommended, FurMark, Prime95, and Memtest.

First up: Furmark - Which is used to stress test your GPU and I sucessfully ran that for 30 minutes without anything happening so I am going to go ahead and safely say it's not my GPU.

Second up: Prime95 - Running a "torture test" to stress test CPU & RAM. It's been running for a few hours now and so far every single test it's passed. However, it's not done. I'm not sure how long it takes. Once it's done I'll try memtest but so far everything is coming back okay.

I also saw some people suggest sharing logs from C:\Windows\Minidump and I went there and it's empty.

Any ideas, anyone?

 

[basroil]

Sounds like a full system crash. Try reinstalling the drivers (clean reinstall) and hope that is the only issue

 

[hawtdog]

Sounds like a full system crash. Try reinstalling the drivers (clean reinstall) and hope that is the only issue

For the GPU? I've already tried that and nothing. I've even ran video stress tests (FurMark) for 30+ minutes without it crashing so I'm thinking the problem isn't GPU related.

 

[hawtdog]

Bumping post. Still happening.
Worth mentioning this seems to happen when idleing or anything else.

NEVER have had it happen while playing a game.

 

[hawtdog]

So, I originally had Windows 8 and got the free Windows 10 upgrade.

I thought maybe a clean install would fix the issue so I just dropped $120 on a download of Windows 10 Home and put it on my USB drive and did a clean install hoping it would fix the issue.

And nope. Still happening. Was really hoping doing a clean install would fix it. Seems I wasted the money.

 

[BlackVulcan]

So, I originally had Windows 8 and got the free Windows 10 upgrade.

I thought maybe a clean install would fix the issue so I just dropped $120 on a download of Windows 10 Home and put it on my USB drive and did a clean install hoping it would fix the issue.

And nope. Still happening. Was really hoping doing a clean install would fix it. Seems I wasted the money.

Ever figured out the problem? I have the EXACT same problem as you, and I've done the EXACT same steps as you before I ran into your post. (it's honestly chilling since it's almost to the dot). I've also installed Win10 pro hoping to fix it, to no avail as well.

It's seriously so fucking weird that it only happens during video playback for me or once or twice while the PC was idle. It's NEVER happened while gaming (and I play A LOT of games, majority are really intensive like Doom, Witcher, Dota 2 etc). It's so weird that it only happens when idle or under low utilization.

Really hope someone can actually give some meaningful information on what could be the problem. Hope you can post back if you ever figure out the solution, which I'll also do if I find one out as well. It's been harassing me so much recently (not as frequent as you though, maybe once or twice a week since August as well).

 

[hawtdog]

So, I originally had Windows 8 and got the free Windows 10 upgrade.

I thought maybe a clean install would fix the issue so I just dropped $120 on a download of Windows 10 Home and put it on my USB drive and did a clean install hoping it would fix the issue.

And nope. Still happening. Was really hoping doing a clean install would fix it. Seems I wasted the money.

Ever figured out the problem? I have the EXACT same problem as you, and I've done the EXACT same steps as you before I ran into your post. (it's honestly chilling since it's almost to the dot). I've also installed Win10 pro hoping to fix it, to no avail as well.

It's seriously so fucking weird that it only happens during video playback for me or once or twice while the PC was idle. It's NEVER happened while gaming (and I play A LOT of games, majority are really intensive like Doom, Witcher, Dota 2 etc). It's so weird that it only happens when idle or under low utilization.

Really hope someone can actually give some meaningful information on what could be the problem. Hope you can post back if you ever figure out the solution, which I'll also do if I find one out as well. It's been harassing me so much recently (not as frequent as you though, maybe once or twice a week since August as well).

Nope.... Here it is almost a year later and still happening and no one seems to know why. I've tried so many forums.

 

[hawtdog]

This is STILL happening. Any ideas anyone? lol