Question Occasional black screens on PC startup/restart ?

timppa41

Commendable
Dec 2, 2021
3
0
1,510
Hello everybody. This is my first post here and I'm seeking advice to a very random and annoying issue. I'll try to be as thorough as possible.

The first time was a few months ago when I normally booted up my PC. The monitor stayed black (without "no signal" message) but all the fans and lights went on and no error beeps etc. Unplugging the DP cable from the GPU and putting it back in solved the issue that time. Since then the monitor and the DP cable have both been upgraded.
I'm still getting very random and very occasional black screens on startup or restart without "no signal" message. So the PC boots normally, the monitor's RGB lights on the bezel turn on for a few seconds and then turn off and the screen stays black. Usually hard rebooting the PC from the power button helps.

I've noticed that prior to these black screens there's sometimes (but not always) some kind of odd behaviour like an application crash (eg. some old game, I've been playing Far Cry 3 recently) after which I tend to restart Windows. In these app crash situations the restart almost always ends up in black screen. Can't really say if the problem occurs more on normal bootup or restart, it's happened with both. Explaining or diagnosing the problem without any kind of clear pattern is really frustrating.

My current system:
-MSI MAG X570 Tomahawk WiFi (BIOS version 7C84v183 from September)
-R7 2700X (with Scythe Mugen 5 ARGB Plus)
-Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 Super | Gaming OC 3X 8G (Game Ready Driver 496.76)
-32GB (4x8GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000MHz CL15
-Sabrent 1TB Rocket NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD (Windows 10 Pro version 21H1)
-Kingston 500GB A2000 NVMe PCIe 3.0 2280 Internal SSD
-Seagate 2TB BarraCuda 3,5" Internal HDD 7200RPM
-Seasonic G-550 | 80 Plus Gold | 550W | Semi-modular ATX
-Samsung Odyssey G7 32" (with the latest firmware version 1011.0)

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-I've run MemTest86 and it showed 0 errors. Only once though, should it be run several times?
-I haven't overclocked any parts.
-Extreme OuterVision's PSU calculator suggested a 500W PSU for my system, so 550W should be fine?
-At some point I used DDU to install GPU drivers but it didn't solve the issue (used normal installation with the latest driver).
-One day even the hard rebooting method didn't make the black screen go away. Unplugging the GPU and plugging it back to the motherboard solved the issue that time.
-I tried plugging the monitor to my brother's laptop with an HDMI cable. No black screens after several boots/restarts. Although I can also boot/restart my own system several times without black screens because of the problem's irregularity.

Last time this happened was yesterday on Windows restart after FC3 crashed. Hard reboot helped again. But I don't think the game is to blame.

I guess I could just live with it since it's pretty rare but it really eats me when it happens because I wanna know the cause. I'm sure many of you can relate.
My main suspects are GPU, PSU, RAM or maybe even the monitor? But diagnosing this is a pain really. Any thoughts?

Thank you!

EDIT: Enabling/disabling A-XMP from the BIOS doesn't seem to have any effect either.
 

Lutfij

Titan
Moderator
Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

By not overclocking, do you mean that your ram isn't overclocked either? Anything above DDR4-2133MHz, is an overclock. I'd pin a guess that your OS might need a reinstall, considering your BIOS is on the latest(Beta) version and that you seem to have a list of reliably build components. How old is the PSU in your build, at this point? See if sourcing a donor PSU of equal build quality with at least 650W at the entire system's disposal to rule out your PSU showing signs of and early departure.
 
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timppa41

Commendable
Dec 2, 2021
3
0
1,510
Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

By not overclocking, do you mean that your ram isn't overclocked either? Anything above DDR4-2133MHz, is an overclock. I'd pin a guess that your OS might need a reinstall, considering your BIOS is on the latest(Beta) version and that you seem to have a list of reliably build components. How old is the PSU in your build, at this point? See if sourcing a donor PSU of equal build quality with at least 650W at the entire system's disposal to rule out your PSU showing signs of and early departure.
Thanks Lutfij!

RAM has been running with motherboard's A-XMP Profile 2. So yeah, that's the only overclock I've done. Now it's disabled though. Windows was reinstalled once between the problem's first occurrence and the present moment (BIOS updated after that). The PSU is approximately 4,5 years old now. This sound like a PSU problem? I guess I can borrow my friend's EVGA 750W PSU but that's even older than mine.