Black screen during GPU intensive gaming

funguy73 · March 3, 2021

I am not terribly hardware literate. I am trying to solve on ongoing issue but it is well beyond me. I have recently upgraded my PC for gaming with a new GPU, Power supply, and 24 pin à 8 pin adapter cable (because the PC is a Dell – the motherboards have an 8 pin for some odd reason). When I play GPU intensive games I get a black screen on the monitor (says entering power save mode) anywhere from 5 – 100 minutes into gaming. The PC does not crash and I can talk to others on TeamSpeak, they tell me I D/C out of the game but the PC is still running and the CPU cores are all running fine (see below). I must hold the power button to do a re-start. Never a black screen on other PC work or less intensive GPU games. I don’t play a lot of different games, but for some of them I can dial down the settings to ‘potato’ mode and I eliminate black screen. Other games – specifically Star Wars Battlefront 2 – no matter how low I go, black screen happens. I have never tried anything like overclocking the CPU or GPU.

I have a few friends in a gaming group that work in IT so I posted the questions to them in Discord and I have looked for similar problems online in these forums. I have found dozens of solutions in those instances, but none have worked for me. I guess the issue is I can’t seem to diagnose the problem and can’t afford to randomly replace components.

My system:

Dell Optiplex 9020 / Intel i7 4790 @ 3.6 GHz / 8 G Dual-Channel DDR3 / Motherboard: Dell 06X1TJ / GPU GeForce GTX 1650 Super / 238 GB Samsung SSD / Insignia 450 W PSU

I have tried: ran DDU when I installed the new GPU, changing drivers (updating and rolling back through Windows and Geforce), Windows re-install and Windows update (now running 20H2), altered the energy saving options, changed Display Port Chord (also unplug and re-plug during crash), change PSU power chord, Benchmark using Unigine Heaven (about 120 FPS and stable), undervolting with MSI afterburner, custom fan settings in MSI afterburner, re-seating cables on motherboard/GPU, and I have run OpenHardwareMonitor during crashes to log information every second.

Nothing has had an effect. The log from OpenHardwareMonitor is beyond my skills, but I graphed every input over time as a line graph and nothing dips or jumps before or during a crash. The only odd thing is that after the crash, GPU temp says zero and all other GPU values are fixed. I have posted the header and values for everything at the moment of the crash as a tab delimited data file:

https://pastebin.com/ZbRaYBF6

After this time point the GPU temp goes to zero and all other GPU values remain the same until I restart the computer. I can paste the whole database in if that would help.

https://pastebin.com/1WydKmW6

At this point, my IT friends have suggested: 1. Gremlins the electric = bad power supply and I need a bigger one (650 W or higher). 2. I am pushing the RAM to the edge, so get two sticks of 8 G RAM (16 total). 3. My friends have stopped talking to me.

Not sure where to go from here, the price of a 1650 Super has doubled since I bought it 6 months ago, so I am hoping it isn’t a bad GPU, but that also seems like a real possibility to me. I thank you all for the sticking through the long post and I appreciate any advice you can offer to help me manage to finally diagnose the real issue here.

catchup75 · September 28, 2021

On 3/3/2021 at 10:05 AM, funguy73 said:

I am not terribly hardware literate. I am trying to solve on ongoing issue but it is well beyond me. I have recently upgraded my PC for gaming with a new GPU, Power supply, and 24 pin à 8 pin adapter cable (because the PC is a Dell – the motherboards have an 8 pin for some odd reason). When I play GPU intensive games I get a black screen on the monitor (says entering power save mode) anywhere from 5 – 100 minutes into gaming. The PC does not crash and I can talk to others on TeamSpeak, they tell me I D/C out of the game but the PC is still running and the CPU cores are all running fine (see below). I must hold the power button to do a re-start. Never a black screen on other PC work or less intensive GPU games. I don’t play a lot of different games, but for some of them I can dial down the settings to ‘potato’ mode and I eliminate black screen. Other games – specifically Star Wars Battlefront 2 – no matter how low I go, black screen happens. I have never tried anything like overclocking the CPU or GPU.

I have a few friends in a gaming group that work in IT so I posted the questions to them in Discord and I have looked for similar problems online in these forums. I have found dozens of solutions in those instances, but none have worked for me. I guess the issue is I can’t seem to diagnose the problem and can’t afford to randomly replace components.

My system:

Dell Optiplex 9020 / Intel i7 4790 @ 3.6 GHz / 8 G Dual-Channel DDR3 / Motherboard: Dell 06X1TJ / GPU GeForce GTX 1650 Super / 238 GB Samsung SSD / Insignia 450 W PSU

I have tried: ran DDU when I installed the new GPU, changing drivers (updating and rolling back through Windows and Geforce), Windows re-install and Windows update (now running 20H2), altered the energy saving options, changed Display Port Chord (also unplug and re-plug during crash), change PSU power chord, Benchmark using Unigine Heaven (about 120 FPS and stable), undervolting with MSI afterburner, custom fan settings in MSI afterburner, re-seating cables on motherboard/GPU, and I have run OpenHardwareMonitor during crashes to log information every second.

Nothing has had an effect. The log from OpenHardwareMonitor is beyond my skills, but I graphed every input over time as a line graph and nothing dips or jumps before or during a crash. The only odd thing is that after the crash, GPU temp says zero and all other GPU values are fixed. I have posted the header and values for everything at the moment of the crash as a tab delimited data file:

https://pastebin.com/ZbRaYBF6

After this time point the GPU temp goes to zero and all other GPU values remain the same until I restart the computer. I can paste the whole database in if that would help.

https://pastebin.com/1WydKmW6

At this point, my IT friends have suggested: 1. Gremlins the electric = bad power supply and I need a bigger one (650 W or higher). 2. I am pushing the RAM to the edge, so get two sticks of 8 G RAM (16 total). 3. My friends have stopped talking to me.

Not sure where to go from here, the price of a 1650 Super has doubled since I bought it 6 months ago, so I am hoping it isn’t a bad GPU, but that also seems like a real possibility to me. I thank you all for the sticking through the long post and I appreciate any advice you can offer to help me manage to finally diagnose the real issue here.

I have the same issue. my understanding is i am bottleknecking. cpu can handle more. gtx 1650 and 1650s have owners complaining with our system. to be honest im not hearing better from 1660's. rtx 2060 super here i come.