[SOLVED] External Monitor goes black for few seconds

Feb 5, 2021
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Hi everyone, I have an external monitor connected to my laptop. The problem is that very often the external screen goes black for few seconds. Consider that the problem occurs with both windows and ubuntu and that my laptop has an HDMI port and a usb C- display port. Here is what I tried to solve the problem without any result:
  • Tried every resolution and refresh rate and every combination of these
  • Uninstalled drivers of the integrated and discrete graphics card, also with DDU
  • Disabled both the integrated and discrete graphics card
  • BIOS updated
  • Drivers Updated
  • Tried different cables on all the ports of the monitor
  • Tried different monitors
  • Removed the battery and run without it
  • Tried without current
  • Thermal paste replaced on both CPU and GPU
  • Tried different hard drives
  • Tried every power management configuration
  • Used my monitor with a nintendo switch and a chromecast without the issue
Furthermore I am not able to reproduce the issue, it seems to appear very randomly, I also run some benchmarks to test every single component and it seems there is no correlation with temperature or utilization or fan speed. Other 2 details that I noticed:
  • When the notebook is connected via usbC-display port, the monitor also flickers before going black and sometimes the monitor loses signal completely
  • I connected my laptop to a TV and the problem seems not to appear
Can anyone help me? Thank you very much in advance

Here is a video of what happens
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dKlLAogFlrNpJjMG7SpbFzO5ZMzhckxT/view?usp=sharing
 
Last edited:
Solution
If the black screens were caused by (I)GPU driver crashes, it will usually cause all monitors to go black, not only the external ones. You can easily verify that by checking the Windows system event log to see whether there are GPU driver failures in there.

A couple of weeks ago, I had one of my external HDD enclosures freak out on me, causing the entire USB subsystem to restart and I think it caused my monitors to blank out for a second too.

What this may be most similar to though is my HD5770 which could get stuck at 2D clocks under some circumstances (don't remember exactly what those were, probably related to the GPU getting stuck at low clocks while playing a YT video regardless of what else is also using the GPU) and when that...

InvalidError

Titan
Moderator
If the black screens were caused by (I)GPU driver crashes, it will usually cause all monitors to go black, not only the external ones. You can easily verify that by checking the Windows system event log to see whether there are GPU driver failures in there.

A couple of weeks ago, I had one of my external HDD enclosures freak out on me, causing the entire USB subsystem to restart and I think it caused my monitors to blank out for a second too.

What this may be most similar to though is my HD5770 which could get stuck at 2D clocks under some circumstances (don't remember exactly what those were, probably related to the GPU getting stuck at low clocks while playing a YT video regardless of what else is also using the GPU) and when that happened, the GPU simply couldn't reliably keep up with refreshing more than the primary monitor, causing partial second monitor updates and loss of sync.
 
Solution
Feb 5, 2021
7
0
10
If the black screens were caused by (I)GPU driver crashes, it will usually cause all monitors to go black, not only the external ones. You can easily verify that by checking the Windows system event log to see whether there are GPU driver failures in there.

A couple of weeks ago, I had one of my external HDD enclosures freak out on me, causing the entire USB subsystem to restart and I think it caused my monitors to blank out for a second too.

What this may be most similar to though is my HD5770 which could get stuck at 2D clocks under some circumstances (don't remember exactly what those were, probably related to the GPU getting stuck at low clocks while playing a YT video regardless of what else is also using the GPU) and when that happened, the GPU simply couldn't reliably keep up with refreshing more than the primary monitor, causing partial second monitor updates and loss of sync.
There aren't any failures in the event log regarding GPUs