[SOLVED] Occasional black screen issue

[hickey92]

I've been having an issue where my screen will occasionally go black for a few seconds and then come back on afterwards exactly as I had left it. My specs are:

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
HP Compaq 8200 Elite SFF
i5 2500
Gigabyte 1050ti Low Profile
16GB DDR3 RAM 1333mhz (4x4gb)

From looking at various forums I had thought it to be either my graphics card or my PSU, but I'm starting to wonder. I used AIDA64 to run a full system stability test and I was not able to replicate the effect even when everything was running under load, so it doesn't appear to be related to that. It will occasionally happen for a few seconds while I play PC games (for reference, playing Fallout New Vegas on ultra I saw it happen maybe once an hour on average). Sometimes it will also happen just after opening a video, and when switching between graphical settings in games. The most consistent way I have found to replicate it is to run a game in the Dolphin emulator, at which point the screen will rapidly flicker on and off every couple seconds when I try to tab out, and will continue this way until I close Dolphin. It doesn't seem to have any direct link to the temperature of the components or the power draw, because otherwise the stress test would have replicated it, so I'm a little stumped by it.

All I can think of is a driver issue, but I have the latest drivers for my card installed already.

 

[terry4536]

The first thing I would check is the monitor cable. It sounds more like a loose connection to me.

 

[hickey92]

The first thing I would check is the monitor cable. It sounds more like a loose connection to me.

Hey Terry, thanks for responding. I should have mentioned in my original post that I had also tried reseating the graphics card and I had switched between different HDMI cables to check if it was a cable issue with no effect. This issue only seemed to happen on local video playback and game content, and never happened during general internet or program usage for example.

After messing around a lot last night I think I have fixed it. I completely wiped all of the Nvidia drivers and uninstalled the card in device manager. After reinstalling with an older version of the display driver, the problem hasn't happened again after trying a few of the things which replicated it (Dolphin in particular works fine now, whereas before it was unplayable). I haven't had time to see whether it still crops up occasionally, but I'm hopeful that this has fixed it. It's very strange because I couldn't find anyone else online that was experiencing this specific issue due to a bad driver.

Edit: Okay, it did happen again once, but it has become much more infrequent since I changed the drivers. I'm fairly certain this must be a software issue now since changing drivers did drastically improve it and I noticed that when it happens the screen doesn't act like it has lost signal. I need to figure out what else might be causing this, but I don't really have any ideas. It's frustrating since although I'm fairly certain it's software related, I'm not getting any error codes which might help me determine what the issue is.

 

[hickey92]

Just in case anyone else ever encounters this problem with the 1050 ti and finds my question, I'm gonna leave this here as an addendum. I did eventually figure out what the cause of the black screens was. To fix it you have to go into the Nvidia Control Panel>Manage 3D Settings>Global Settings>Power Management Mode, and then set the global power mode to "Prefer Maximum Performance". The issue had something to do with the card going between a high and low power state from what I can tell. Hope this ends up helping somebody.