Question RTX 3070 blackscreens on driver install

[gewl]

Hey,

I got an RTX 3070 about three weeks ago. I installed it with the RAM it came bundled with and installed it, it got up and running no problem and performed great.

One day after about a week, I went to wake my computer up from sleep and couldn't get anything other than a black screen. Restarting gave me a "computer couldn't start" error. I could boot into safe mode, but not into normal mode. I tried:

• System restore.
• Updating BIOS.
• In BIOS, switching PCIe port to Gen3.
• DDU'ing all drivers in safe mode, then reinstalling in normal mode, but computer would black-screen halfway through driver installation. Frozen/buzzing audio makes me think this was not just a display error.
• Every different driver version that the NVIDIA site provides for download, various combinations of "just GPU drivers", "GeForce experience + audio drivers + PhysX", etc.
• Rolling back recent Windows updates.

Finally, after another seemingly-halted driver install, I opened my tower and reseated the GPU. I expected that even if this worked, best-case, I would have to safe mode -> DDU -> normal mode -> reinstall drivers to fix what seemed like an incomplete driver install, but the computer actually ran perfectly after the reseat. Again, no detectable GPU problems whatsoever.

This morning, I woke up to the same problem again. Exact same behavior, except that the few reseats I've tried have not fixed it. Event viewer only shows Error 41 under Critical. The GPU lights up, I see no indication that the mobo is having trouble communicating with it, no error 43's or anything. I'm at the end of my rope and don't know what else to try.

Does anyone have any thoughts on something else I could try?

Update: I just tried reinstalling Windows for the first time. Now when I install drivers, I get a black screen halfway through, but instead of hanging indefinitely it goes straight into a reboot. I think it tries to reboot twice before sending me back to the "repair/restart" prompt. Before this, it would always hang on a black screen until I shut it down by holding the tower's power button.

 

[rgd1101]

full system spec? include make and model of the psu

 

[gewl]

full system spec? include make and model of the psu

Oh, oops, thought I included that.

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor
MB: B550-A PRO (MS-7C56)
PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 750W 80+ Gold
GPU: RTX 3070
RAM: 4x8gb DDR4 (2x OLOy 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3000, 2x GeIL EVO POTENZA AMD 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400)

Also, the last of the boilerplate Windows recovery options that I haven't tried is a Windows reinstall—wasn't sure if that was pertinent. The reseating apparently fixing it last time has made me very confused about whether this is hardware or software.