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PC Drivers & Software

tyrop
Adept I

Possible solution for black screens, crashes, reboots

I see a lot of threads with the same issue, and I am going to post this in a few of them.  I have a Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 XT.  I also have an X570 motherboard (MSI MPG Gaming Edge Plus WiFi).  I have a similar problem where I get random black screens.  I hear sound for a few seconds and then the system reboots.  It seems to happen when the computer is idle or not under a heavy load.  Someone else posted a link to a video they found online with a possible solution and it worked for me.  I cannot find the post or the video, though.

The problem was that the video card actually does not work well with PCI-E generation 4.  (If you have a motherboard that does not have PCI-E gen 4, then this will not be your solution.)  

Many (but from what I understand not all) motherboards have a setting for the PCI-E slots that allow you to select the highest generation of PCI-E that it will accept.  The solution for me was to go into the motherboard's advanced BIOS settings and find the settings for the PCI-E slot where the card is plugged in. For almost everyone, it would be in PCI-E slot 1.   Change the setting from Gen 4 to Gen 3.  (From what I read online, we probably are not getting too much benefit from Gen 4 anyway). 

I have not tested this for more than a day, but I left my computer alone for hours.  It would have black-screened and rebooted after 10 minutes.  So far, no black screens, no crashes, no reboots, so I think it worked.  

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tyrop
Adept I

Well, on my second day, I got 2 random black screen/reboots, so this fix turned out not to work.  

I get random black screens, the sound continues for a few seconds and I get a Windows arrow, and then the system reboots.  Its usually after 10 minutes to 30 minutes of the computer being idle.  I have had this computer for a month and this only started happening about a week ago.  I tried setting the PCI-e slot to PCI-e Gen3, I tried uninstalling last week's Windows updates.  I ran a memory test.  No use.  The only thing the event log tells me is not helpful:

"The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly."

I have the following:

Ryzen 3900X

MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge Plus WiFi

Sapphire RX 5700XT 

Gskill Trident Z 3600 memory

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Glaneon
Journeyman III

Huh...  We all have the same motherboard...

Mine does not crash THAT regularly.  Mine crashes about once a week, sometimes 2 in a day though. 

Always only NOT under load.  No problems when gaming, ever.

I have a RTX 3080, and it's happened with a 2nd one (that's another story); I can't imagine that it WOULDNT work with the PCIe 4.0... 

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