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spectre1995
Adept I

Black Screen of Death Crashing on Various Games

System Info;

OS: Windows 10

GPU: RX 480 - Driver Version 19.6.1

CPU: FX 8320

RAM: 16GB G.Skill Ripjaws (4x 4GB)

PSU: Coolmax ZX-700

MB: MSI 970A Carbon

Over the past several days, I've had a gradually worsening issue of my computer freezing up, the screen going black, and the audio playing a horrendous loop of whatever audio was playing at the time of the crash. The screen will be completely black, the audio will loop for several seconds, then silence. No recovery, I have to hard reset every time. At first, this only happened when playing Ghost Recon Wildlands at my usual settings, but also happened on several less graphics intensive games such as Fallout New Vegas, and Car Mechanic Simulator 2018. I would notice the GPU temperature peak around 65C, and not get much higher than that. I assumed it was an overheating issue, so I took the computer and dusted it out thoroughly. When that didn't help, I took the side panel of the case off and left a fan next to the case to help get cold air moving through it. Still no improvement, and if anything it gradually got worse over time.

I tried several measures, such as playing with the fan settings to get the fan to stay at a constant RPM to keep the card cool, pulling the RAM chips out and resetting them in different slots, moving the GPU to the other PCI-E slot, resetting the CMOS, doing a fresh install on the AMD drivers, and updating the BIOS (which did not work as the BIOS UI froze up upon trying to load the new version in). The only thing that seemed to have any positive effect was resetting the CMOS.

Earlier in the day I set my graphics settings in Wildlands to the lowest possible settings and it ran relatively stable. FPS wasn't the best surprisingly but I did not experience any crashing. This was directly after resetting the CMOS, which had the most positive effect. I assumed that resetting the CMOS had solved the issue, as I had gone for several hours at that point without having any issues, so I turned my graphics settings back up to where they usually are (Very High with some customizing), and was able to go for about 30 minutes before experiencing the same black screen crash. 

Before I was running Afterburner, but I've been told that clashes with the built in Wattman settings, so I uninstalled it. Now I changed my settings in Wattman to reflect a +50% power increase, and a -10% GPU frequency (per another thread's suggestions) and I'm about to see if this has any effect.

I've been told that this is becoming a common issue with certain BIOS versions on certain motherboards, with this particular set of AMD drivers. Is there any correlation, or am I looking at a possible hardware fault on my end?

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3 Replies
spectre1995
Adept I

Quick update, increasing power limit to +50% and reducing frequency by -10% had zero effect. Crashed again after 30 minutes.

Also It's worth noting that when it crashes, I get a "No Signal" notification on my monitor, and no further audio is played in the background. Just the black screen (indicating no signal) until I do a hard reset

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spectre1995
Adept I

Further update; I now believe this to be a hardware issue. I have my fans set to manual RPM control at 100%, and only one fan is powering up. The fan towards the rear of the case looks like it's attempting to spin, but just barely moves before coming to a stop. The "Fan Stop" light on the side of the card is lit up. I'll be on the phone with Gigabyte tomorrow to start the RMA process. Hopefully this solves the issue.

Hello, i have exactly the same problem.

Can you keep me informed plz ?

Have a nice day

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