EVGA GTX 670 black screens when gaming

[DavidVioMC]

I recently traded my old GPU for a EVGA GTX 670 with a guy locally, he said the card works great and he has been gaming on it 1080p for the past few years without issues. I had this card for about a month and it's giving me black screen when gaming about once an hour, sometimes once every two hours. I seem to get three different types of black screens;
1. The screen goes black, the audio still keeps playing but not live audio, for example background music that may be playing in the game before the black screen but not live audio, stuff like shooting ect and the screen will comeback after about 8 seconds of black screen and you can carry on playing.
2. The screen goes black for about 5 seconds, then monitor says no output for 2 seconds and then GPU outputs black screen. I need to restart the PC when this happens.
3. The screen goes black and after 5 seconds the monitor says no output and it stays like that. I need to restart my PC too when this happens.

The card is watercooled, but I was getting the same issues when I was on air aswell, my temps on air were steady 70c, would never go higher than 70c, my current temps on water are in low 50's, will never go past 55c. I had the card overclocked at the start but after this started happening, I took it off as I assumed it was unstable overclock but dosen't seem to be. I am running the latest drivers, but this was also happening on older version of drivers before updated ones came out and I did remove my old GPU drivers with DDU.

I would also like to point out that I traded my EVGA 430W PSU with a Corsair CX600 as I needed that one extra PCIe power connector for my GTX 670, it is used, but the guy said he is trading it due to getting an upgrade and wanted my PSU for his wife's build, also claimed nothing to be wrong with the PSU. I'm unsure if the PSU could be at fault here aswell. I only get black screens when gaming, I don't get any when in normal use such as browsing internet or watching movies which I do a lot.

 

[King_V]

This may well not be relevant, but out of curiosity, what was your previous GPU?

That aside, the PSU *might* be at issue. Hard to say, really. I don't suppose there's anyone you could borrow a known, reliable PSU from to try out?

 

[DavidVioMC]

This may well not be relevant, but out of curiosity, what was your previous GPU?

That aside, the PSU *might* be at issue. Hard to say, really. I don't suppose there's anyone you could borrow a known, reliable PSU from to try out?

It was a GTX 750ti, unfortunely I don't really have someone that I can borrow a PSU from, I looked around my old tech bin to see if I have a spare PSU that could test one with and I only have a 1U PSU and few old Optiplex PSU with those stupid micro-atx connectors so it's a no-go.

I'll be building a PC for a friend in about a month, I guess I could use his PSU just to test with but that would also mean another month of dealing with restarts and frustration. While I was in Afterburner today I noticed that my power limit was set at 122%, propably I set it to max when I had the overlock and forgot it to put it back to 100% when I took the overclock off, so that's what I did, put it back at 100%. I played CSGO for about 3 hours where I get black screens the mosts and I haven't gotten one, I can't say for sure yet if this has resolved the issue or helped since the black screens are not consistent, sometimes I can play CSGO for whole day without black screens and sometimes I will get one once an hour. I do play a lot of another games and I do get black screens in most but it happens a LOT on CSGO. The PSU is 600W and theres no way I'm using it all up with an i5 2500, GTX 670, 8GB RAM, a 4W waterpump and few SP120 fans. So it's very strange to me that the PSU would have an issue with power delivery, but then again, after a quick Google search, people are saying CX series PSU are trash with cheap capacitors, but I don't think it should have an issue of delivering 300W-400W. This is also hard to troubleshoot the issue since I replaced the GPU and PSU at the same time and I didn't have the issue on old hardware.

 

[King_V]

Ok,the reason I asked about the old GPU is that there are some (older, I think) systems that I've read about (and one that I have) that are notoriously finicky about working with Nvidia GPUs. In my particular case, I tried to put an Nvidia GPU in to replace an AMD, and, even though the motherboard used an Nvidia nForce chipset, it was ridiculously unstable with the Nvidia video card. Strangely,though, it was fine playing games, and I'd get black screens during web browsing, or even just sitting at the desktop doing nothing, and ALWAYS requiring a reboot, but sometimes it would self-reboot if I gave time.

Yeah, that's the sucky part about changing two parts at once... can't quite pinpoint if it's the GPU or PSU in this case.

Hopefully the reduction in the power limit solves the problem!