[SOLVED] Black screen of death on relatively new PC

[CluelessPCGamer]

Hi all

So yesterday I had a weird crash on my PC, that I built late last spring. I was browsing on Firefox and all of a sudden my screen blacked out, then came back on, and this happened repeatedly until I did a hard shutdown and turned the power off completely for a few minutes. When I rebooted, I still got a black screen, until I changed DP port on the GPU. One weird thing I noticed when the black screen was coming on and off again, was that the only icon on the taskbar was the Windows logo and none of the other shortcuts. When I got a signal again, I booted up HWMonitor and a game, and played for 10 minutes, then I got a black screen again, changed DisplayPorts again while the PC was running, and it worked. I then updated the Nvidia GPU driver from 572.16 to 572.42 and played for 40 minutes straight. I didn't notice any perfomance hickups or strange temps on HWMonitor. I did a few memtest passes through the night, no errors either, also did CHKDSK and nothing out of the ordinary.
Today I've played a couple of hours of Kingdom Come 2, with no issues.

PC specs are as follows:
ASUS Prime Z790-A
Intel Core i7 13700k
GeForce RTX 3070
G.Skill Trident Z Z5 2x 16GB DDR5
Samsung 980 Pro 1TB
Corsair RM1000x 1000w
Windows 11 Home

(I know the PSU is overkill for my machine, but I want to upgrade the GPU down the line)

As you can see, I'm one of the unfortunate owners of the 13th gen Intel CPUs, so I'm a bit worried. I updated the BIOS and the microcode last august though.

These are the errors record in event log when it first happened (Didn't create a minidump):
Hyper-V-Hypervisor 167
volmgr 162
Kernel-PnP 219
Kernel-Power 41

I realize that without a minidump, so I know it's hard to say what it might be. What do you guys think happened? Should I be worried about the CPU, GPU, PSU or chalk it up to Windows/drivers having a bad day?

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Hey there,

Did you clear CMOS after the bios update? If not, I'd start there to rule it out. By not clearing CMOS, you run the risk of microcode remaining from the previous version, that could cause stability issues, and glitches.

How old is the RMX?

Kernel power 41 means that the power was cut off suddenly. It may be that something tripped your PSU overprotection's.

When it crashes screen just goes black. Does it restart by itself?

 

[helpstar]

check memory with memtest
check ssd with samsung magician, eventually update the firmware of it
check windows with dism commands

 

[CluelessPCGamer]

Hey there,

Did you clear CMOS after the bios update? If not, I'd start there to rule it out. By not clearing CMOS, you run the risk of microcode remaining from the previous version, that could cause stability issues, and glitches.

How old is the RMX?

Kernel power 41 means that the power was cut off suddenly. It may be that something tripped your PSU overprotection's.

When it crashes screen just goes black. Does it restart by itself?

Thanks for the reply.

I haven't cleared the CMOS, so I'll do that straight away.

The RMX is 10ish months old.

It didn't restart by itself, it was like it was in a loop, black screen and then back to desktop, it only stayed for a few seconds, then went black again. When it came back, I could move the cursor, but it was otherwise unresponsive. I had to force a shutdown through the power button.

 

[CluelessPCGamer]

check memory with memtest
check ssd with samsung magician, eventually update the firmware of it
check windows with dism commands

Thanks for the reply.

I did the memtest overnight, will do the other suggestions now.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

Thanks for the reply.

I haven't cleared the CMOS, so I'll do that straight away.

The RMX is 10ish months old.

It didn't restart by itself, it was like it was in a loop, black screen and then back to desktop, it only stayed for a few seconds, then went black again. When it came back, I could move the cursor, but it was otherwise unresponsive. I had to force a shutdown through the power button.

Yeah, that's not screaming a PSU issue.

Are all system drivers up to date? Specially chipset?

I presume you are using the power cord, and internal cables that came with the PSU, yes?

is it possible to try the PC power cord in a different wall outlet?

 

[geofelt]

Update your bios to currency. August is not recent enough.
The fixes will keep you from damaging your processor.

 

[CluelessPCGamer]

Yeah, that's not screaming a PSU issue.

Are all system drivers up to date? Specially chipset?

I presume you are using the power cord, and internal cables that came with the PSU, yes?

is it possible to try the PC power cord in a different wall outlet?

All drivers are up to date as of writing. The only driver that was out of date when it happened, was the Nvidia driver. I was running the driver released late january, and hadn't updated to the one released a week ago.

The power cord, yes, but I bought Corsair sleeved cables on the side.

If it happens again, I'll try another outlet and see if that's it.

 

[Roland Of Gilead]

All drivers are up to date as of writing. The only driver that was out of date when it happened, was the Nvidia driver. I was running the driver released late january, and hadn't updated to the one released a week ago.

The power cord, yes, but I bought Corsair sleeved cables on the side.

If it happens again, I'll try another outlet and see if that's it.

Let us know how you get on.

 

[CluelessPCGamer]

Update your bios to currency. August is not recent enough.
The fixes will keep you from damaging your processor.

Thank you, I will. I can see that the latest BIOS update is from november, so I'll get right on that.

 

[CluelessPCGamer]

Let us know how you get on.

Thanks, I will update you guys! Crossing my fingers that it was a fluke, the system has been running flawlessly since I built it, but knowing what we now know about the 13th/14th gen Intels, when something happens, you suddenly get a bit worried

 

[CluelessPCGamer]

I've done all the updates I could find, memtested my RAM, health checked my drive, stress tested my GPU and checked all the connections inside the machine. I haven't had a weird event like that since, or anything out of the ordinary for that matter. I have worked from home all day today on remote desktop, played Kingdom Come 2 and played Darktide 2, and it all worked just fine.

I have a sneaky suspicion that it was either a driver issue (Maybe the Nvidia driver, I read that some people had issues with 572.16, that I updated from), or some other software conflict, because I can't find fault with my components.

Thanks for all the answers.