Drivers & Software

[voxceleste]

TLDR: Stress-test in the Adrenalin software produces 100% reliable black screen on any preset, that I've tried (4 out of 4 times)

Hi! Many of you seen or have been experiencing the "black screen" issue. One of the main problems is that it's semi-random and can't be reliably replicated. Not now!

I had this issue for almost two years now. Tried most of the tips here except downclocking, I think. Usually it black screens on some effects-heavy scenes in games and it's more likely to do so under dx12 and vulkan - that's the gist. Sometimes you can produce a black screen semi-reliably, but your mileage may vary. You can turn the effects off, but you can also throw your card into the bin and get some card that is 5 generations older for that matter.

So I did clean install the new "recommended" driver (21.3.1) and without changing anything just ran the test.

I used the bug reporting tool in Adrenalin and I hope AMD will somehow contact me, because I'm so so tired of it being so unreliable. Would like others to test, because it's not likely that I will get an RMA on a card and I still hope that it's something driver related.

CPU: i5-4430

RAM: 16GB

GPU: Asus Rog Strix Vega 56

Win 10 1909

PSU: Seasonic plus gold 750w (that I've cleared through their support that it's a newer and fixed model that should have no problems with Vega)

Two monitors - one with Freesync and one without. DP and DP-converter-vga connections.

[colesdav]

Check the thermal pads cover the VRMs on that GPU. 

[colesdav]

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ay34-gNFW8M

[voxceleste]

Thanks for the reply and for the link! I haven't got the guts to disassemble the thing, but judging from the side - it does seem that the pad is somewhat properly installed. Also there's no issue with the temps as far as I can see. Even on stress-test gui it crashes with the temps in 40-60 range, which is ridiculous to say the least.

In Linux (which has an older driver) it reports sub 100C junction temps in some cases, but I haven't seen anything else ridiculous there. But there's no way to do the black screen crash reliably there, so it is what it is.

It always seems temperature related, but for the most time observing this behavior I'm convinced that it's not. I will monitor some more.

[voxceleste]

I found out that my cpu (haswell i5-4430) may have had some overheating issues (it has 72C critical value), so I changed my CPU cooler. It helped a ton with a cooling, but stress test by amd is still gives me a black screen crash

[voxceleste]

it doesn't crash to black screen in case where I put power limit down 50%. Crashes again on -25%.