Question Screens goes black when playing games, only way to reset is to restart/reboot PC ?

[Hammahness]

I recently came back home from college for summer break and my PC was basically sitting in my room for 4 months with no activity. The first thing I did was update all my drivers through Windows update in settings, my NVidia drivers to 552.22 and all other miscellaneous drivers through the third party app DriverEasy. However, every now and then when I am playing games, my two monitors will suddenly go black as if its not detecting any feedback from my GPU but I can still hear the audio of the game through my headphones and the only way for it to display anything again is to hard reboot my PC by holding the power button.

The only fix I've tried so far is was to completely uninstall the current NVidia Driver with DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller v18.0.6.4) and rollback my NVidia driver back to 546.33 since that was the most stable driver I've used before I left to go back to college in December. However, it is still happening and now I'm not sure if the driver is the culprit anymore and I'm not sure what to do. My temps are also stable, with my CPU not going any higher than 55 C and my GPU not exceeding 82 C at any point so I'm certain it can't be an overheating issue. Nothing is overclocked too, running my CPU at stock settings as well as my GPU, with only my RAM overclocked if you count using the XMP profile as overclocking.

Heres the specs to my PC:
CPU: Intel i9-9900k
GPU: ASUS TUF RTX 3080 GAMING
RAM: 32gb DDR4 3600 mhz
Motherboard: Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI
SSD: Samsung EVO 970 Pro
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 850 P2

 

[Lutfij]

and all other miscellaneous drivers through the third party app DriverEasy
This was your primary mistake, you should've cross referenced the driver versions that were listed on your motherboard/devices support site, then check if you're pending an update, then you manually reinstall with an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

BIOS version for your motherboard? How old is the PSU in your build? How are you cooling the processor?

When using DDU, you run it in Safe Mode and remove all GPU drivers(Intel, AMD and Nvidia), then manually reinstall in an elevated command with the latest driver version.

 

[Hammahness]

and all other miscellaneous drivers through the third party app DriverEasy
This was your primary mistake, you should've cross referenced the driver version that were listed on your motherboard/devices support site, then check if you're pending an update, then you manually reinstall with an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

BIOS version for your motherboard? How old is the PSU in your build? How are you cooling the processor?

When using DDU, you run it in Safe Mode and remove all GPU drivers(Intel, AMD and Nvidia), then manually reinstall in an elevated command with the latest driver version.

Right now I have the Bios version F12k from January 2021 but theres a newer bios version that was released in January 2024. I'll try updating my bios to that to see if it fixes the problem. The power supply in my build was from 2019 so its older than most of the parts that I replaced in my current build. When I used DDU, I made sure I uninstalled the GPU drivers in safe mode also. Also, I've never had problems with DriverEasy in the past but what you mentioned makes sense so if DriverEasy ends up being the problem, I'll make sure to cross reference in the future.

 

[Hammahness]

and all other miscellaneous drivers through the third party app DriverEasy
This was your primary mistake, you should've cross referenced the driver versions that were listed on your motherboard/devices support site, then check if you're pending an update, then you manually reinstall with an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

BIOS version for your motherboard? How old is the PSU in your build? How are you cooling the processor?

When using DDU, you run it in Safe Mode and remove all GPU drivers(Intel, AMD and Nvidia), then manually reinstall in an elevated command with the latest driver version.

Updating the bios didn't seem to do anything. Forgot to mention that I'm cooling my CPU with a AIO 280mm liquid cooler. I think at this point I might just do my tried-and-true method that fixed all my previous problems: reinstall Windows 10.

 

[Hammahness]

I recently came back home from college for summer break and my PC was basically sitting in my room for 4 months with no activity. The first thing I did was update all my drivers through Windows update in settings, my NVidia drivers to 552.22 and all other miscellaneous drivers through the third party app DriverEasy. However, every now and then when I am playing games, my two monitors will suddenly go black as if its not detecting any feedback from my GPU but I can still hear the audio of the game through my headphones and the only way for it to display anything again is to hard reboot my PC by holding the power button. What I've tried so far was to completely uninstall the current NVidia Driver with DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller v18.0.6.4) and rollback my NVidia driver back to 546.33 since that was the most stable driver I've used before I left to go back to college in December. However, it still kept happening and I wasn't sure if the driver was the culprit. I completely reinstalled Windows 10, updated my bios on my system, and installed NVidia Driver version 546.33 alongside Windows and it seemed to have fixed the problem as I haven't experienced the black screen crash for 2 days until today when I was playing Warframe and it happened randomly. I assumed it was a driver issue since reinstalling Windows seemed to have fixed the black screen crash but with today's occurrence, this makes me think it might be a hardware issue at this point. My temps are also stable, with my CPU not going any higher than 55 C and my GPU not exceeding 82 C at any point so I'm certain it can't be an overheating issue. Nothing is overclocked too, running my CPU at stock settings as well as my GPU, with only my RAM overclocked if you count using the XMP profile as overclocking.

Heres the specs to my PC:
CPU: Intel i9-9900k
GPU: ASUS TUF RTX 3080 GAMING
RAM: 32gb DDR4 3600 mhz
Motherboard: Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI
SSD: Samsung EVO 970 Pro
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA 850 P2

 

[Hammahness]

and all other miscellaneous drivers through the third party app DriverEasy
This was your primary mistake, you should've cross referenced the driver versions that were listed on your motherboard/devices support site, then check if you're pending an update, then you manually reinstall with an elevated command, i.e, Right click installer>Run as Administrator.

BIOS version for your motherboard? How old is the PSU in your build? How are you cooling the processor?

When using DDU, you run it in Safe Mode and remove all GPU drivers(Intel, AMD and Nvidia), then manually reinstall in an elevated command with the latest driver version.

Hey, I'm not sure if you read my updated post above but reinstalling windows 10 didn't work. I'm still experiencing the problem but it only happens when playing Warframe. I stress tested my GPU using AIDA64 and Heaven Benchmark too to see if the GPU is dying but it did fine in those without experiencing the black screen crash. Any other suggestions you think I could try or what the root of the problem could be?