Question Monitors lose signal with dedicated GPU but fine with iGPU ?

spitfire47x

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Apr 4, 2018
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Hello! Several months ago I started losing signal on my two monitors intermittently, requiring me to hold the power button until the system went off. When I powered it back on they would work fine. It was usually weeks between having to do this so I didn't think much of it, but recently it's happening more and more often. Sometimes the fans go crazy and sometimes it will reboot by itself but neither one happens every time. This usually happens when gaming, but not always.
If I plug the monitors directly into the motherboard and unplug power from the GPU, everything is stable and works fine.

Some things I have tried so far that haven't worked:

  • Uninstalling the drivers with DDU and clean installing them.
  • Installing old drivers from Jan 2022.
  • Allowing windows to download GPU drivers automatically after uninstalling and rebooting, not manually installing any.
  • Adding TDR entries to the registry to create a longer timeout delay.
  • One of the system errors I got was "cplspcon" terminating, so I disabled the intel HDPC service.
  • RMA'd the graphics card twice.
  • Brand new card (which I ended up returning because it was still happening).
  • Using a different PCIE slot (with both cards).
  • New power cable from PSU to GPU.
  • New power supply.
  • Plugging computer directly into the wall instead of a UPS.
  • Ran the windows memory check diagnostic, no problem.
  • Repaired windows (keeping files and apps).
  • Ran sfc scannow repair, which did find something and repair it, but ran it again several times afterwards with no problems.

Yesterday was my best day in a while, running for 6 hours or so. I was able to play a game. I ran the intel processor diagnostic. I ran unigine heaven benchmark on extreme. I thought I was good, but eventually got the same result. No errors were in the event viewer immediately before losing monitor signal, but I do see some DCOM errors about 4 hours prior. I plugged the monitors back into the motherboard after that and the computer is still up and running now, 17 hours later.

Specs:
Motherboard MSI Z490 Gaming Plus
Intel i7 10700k (I am not overclocking)
32gb Crucial Ballistix 3600mhz dd4 ram
MSI ventus 1660 super GPU
Samsung 970 evo NVME drive 500gb
Samsung 860 evo SSD 1tb
Corsair AX850 PSU (backup PSU is Corsair RM750e)

Thanks for any help.
 
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spitfire47x

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Apr 4, 2018
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The monitors worked well enough to run diagnostics and some other things in regular windows so I haven't spent much time in safe mode (other than DDU). I may have found a bandaid fix, for now anyway. I installed MSI afterburner and underclocked core and memory clocks by as much as possible (502 MHz). It was mostly idle yesterday and didn't crash. Today I'm on 6 hours of uptime, including some gaming, no crash.

Any ideas on why it would work under these conditions? Should I send the card back again? I can't imagine the brand new PSU is the culprit. Is this common with "super" cards that are factory OC? I've never had one before.

I'll update again with any further issues/solutions, I really don't consider this current fix to be a long term solution since I have to pull back performance so much.
 

spitfire47x

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Apr 4, 2018
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4,510
Shouldn't have posted that W because it black screened and crashed again about an hour later. Kernel event 117. The screens stayed black even after a reboot this time, I had to plug them into iGPU. After running DDU I can now use the GPU again. Seems like something is periodically corrupting the drivers?
 
Last edited:

Aeacus

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Allowing windows to download GPU drivers automatically after uninstalling and rebooting, not manually installing any.

Manual installs are always better than automatic ones. So, avoid automatic installs whenever possible.

Seems like something is periodically corrupting the drivers?

Something you haven't done but can fix the issue:
Format OS drive and make a clean Win installation.

This will get rid of all software issues, including bloatware and most malware (except rootkits).