Question Monitors Black Screening, PC Still Runs, Hard Lock

[brian.taylor]

Hi Everyone,

I built my PC back in January of 2018. Here is the parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/r7MtXH.

I use the PC for work as well as playing games (mostly Rocket League at 2k 165 FPS, and occasionally other titles). It has been a great PC for the most part but I started having some small issues about a year ago:

- I started getting FPS lag whenever I have a blinking windows notification. Seems to only happen when I get one of those notifications from outlook, teams, or when I get a party request from Steam. Not a huge problem, I just click the notification to stop the blinking and everything is fine.

- I got the occasional blue screens so I ended up removing all overclocks and just playing with all the basic settings on the CPU, memory, and graphics card. Cant really remember the last time i had a blue screen.

- My big problem is this god damn black screen of death. When I'm using my PC, I randomly have an issue where all of my screens go completely black (I have 4 monitors, 3 to display ports and one to VGA) and say NO INPUT DETECTED. My PC on the other hand, looks totally fine. Motherboard, Ram, Graphics Card, etc. all showing lights and fans still running. However, the PC is completely unresponsive. If I'm on a call or watching a movie, I lose the sound. The power button also won't work to turn off the PC. I have to flip the switch on the power supply, wait a few seconds for all the lights to power off, then switch it back on and reboot. Always boots up fine afterwards. Doesn't seem to matter what I'm doing when it happens. Sometimes I'm working (just outlook, teams, Edge, etc. Nothing intensive), sometimes I'm gaming (it's rocket league, not really a behemoth in the graphics department), and sometimes the PC is just idling while I'm gone and I'll come back to it stuck in this black screen mode.

Here is everything I've done so far to troubleshoot:

- Checked system logs. Nothing there. Just says PC didn't shut down properly after I reboot.

- Mem Test says everything is fine.

- Cleaned PC and repasted CPU. Better temps but didn't solve my issue.

- Been checking temps with Corsair link and I'm not seeing anything that would be a cause for alarm.

-User Benchmark produces no problems at all.

- Saw that my PSU had a sort of recall from SeaSonic: View: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/9zd1os/seasonic_updated_statement_after_the/
. Even though I'm not using a Vega or the other card mentioned, I figured it was worth a shot since I'm planning a new build anyway that I think will need a bigger PSU. So I bought this guy: https://www.bequiet.com/en/powersupply/884. Installed it and redid my cable management just in case. Much cleaner now and I didn't have any issues for a couple of days but now it has happened again and I'm fed the hell up with this.

So what's my next move here? Replace GPU? Replace CPU? Replace MOBO? Kind of at a loss actually :/

 

[rocktalkrock]

Have you checked for any issues in Device Manager?
Have you updated your graphics card to the latest drivers?
Have you tried a clean reinstall of your graphics card drivers?
Have you updated your motherboard to the latest drivers and BIOS?

 

[brian.taylor]

Have you checked for any issues in Device Manager?
Have you updated your graphics card to the latest drivers?
Have you tried a clean reinstall of your graphics card drivers?
Have you updated your motherboard to the latest drivers and BIOS?

No issues in Device Manager.
Updated the drivers for the graphics card a few days ago and had a crash last night so that didn't help.
Haven't tried a clean install of the GPU drivers but I'll do that.
Haven't updated BIOS recently so I'll give that a go now.

I've also removed the monitor that was utilizing the DVI port. It occurred to me that I don't remember having this issue before adding that 4th monitor so maybe that's the problem.

In the mean time, any other advice is appreciated.

 

[brian.taylor]

No issues in Device Manager.
Updated the drivers for the graphics card a few days ago and had a crash last night so that didn't help.
Haven't tried a clean install of the GPU drivers but I'll do that.
Haven't updated BIOS recently so I'll give that a go now.

I've also removed the monitor that was utilizing the DVI port. It occurred to me that I don't remember having this issue before adding that 4th monitor so maybe that's the problem.

In the mean time, any other advice is appreciated.

Updated the bios. Will try the GPU drivers later tonight.

 

[purplefanta]

I just started getting the same issues as well, did the GPU driver update fix the issue?

 

[brian.taylor]

I just started getting the same issues as well, did the GPU driver update fix the issue?

So I did everything on the list provided by rocktalkrock and I had the issue one more time like an hour after I updated the GPU drivers. I then went on an uninstall spree and got rid of some applications that I didn't use and seemed to be a pain point for other in the past. Most notably, I removed Asus AI Suite. I also went in to Bitdefender and disabled the Optimization profiles (game mode, work mode, etc) that it had automatically started using when those features were added a while back. Since then, I haven't seen the issue again but I really couldn't point at one of these things individually and say which one, if any, was the cause of my problem with any certainty. I'll update this again if the issue returns. I haven't seen it in about a week, but I really haven't been doing a whole lot on my PC recently.