Black screen crash

DracoCW · April 18, 2021

Hi everyone, new guy here who is out of ideas. For a couple of weeks now I have problems with my PC. When I am playing a game (it startet with Total War Warhammer 2 and as of yesterday it even happens with Red Dead Redemption 2) it runs for a while (between 30 minutes to 2 hours) and then all my screens go black (I have 3 displays) and show 'signal lost', sound continues to play (sometimes it does not though) and all I can do is do a hard reset.

I have bought a new computer last December with the following specs:

AMD Ryzen 9 5900x

EVGA RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra Gaming

32 GB Crucial Ballistix Max Gaming Memory (DDR4 - 4000)

Asus Crosshair VIII Impact

2x 2x 2 TB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS (runs in RAID1)

Corsair SFX 750

I put everything into a Ncase M1

I have three displays connected to the GPU via DisplayPort, one is the Acer Predator X27 and two are the Dell U278Q

I had a bad feeling about the GPU from the start. For my taste I got low scores with it in 3D Mark (around 17500 GPU Score, I think it should be higher for a 3090), but I did not have any crashes. I did not OC the card, I tried undervolting and at a certain point Time Spy would always crash. It crashed everytime when I set the speed to about 1950 MHz at 975 mV. But I do not think that causes the problem because since the crashes started last week I ran the GPU completely on stock. CPU is also running on stock.

Now I wanted to change my system back to my old Fractal Design Define R6, because the temps in the Ncase where a little to high for my taste. So end of March I bought a new mainboard and also a new PSU since I thought the issue was the 750 watts PSU, so my specs are the same except the following:

Asus ROG Crosshair VIII Hero WiFi (instead of the Crosshair VIII Impact)

Corsair HX1200 (instead of the SFX 750)

Temps should be fine. In the Fractal Design Case the CPU is at 45-50 celsius in idle and about 70-80 under load, GPU is around 60 in idle and also 70-80 under load.

The crashes remain. In addition setting the RAM speed gets kinda funky. When I activate DOCP (thats what Asus is calling XMP in the BIOS), most of the time it works (RAM runs at 4000 MHz with 18-19-19-19-39 and 1.35V). But sometimes after a crash my system does not boot and I have to clear the CMOS to get the system to start.

I have reinstalled Windows, all drivers are up to date (current Geforce and AMD chipset drivers etc.). I checked every connection. I also have run memtest86 (no errors), Prime95 (no crashes). I have tried using only one memory stick at the time (yes, I put them in the right slots ), I even tried leaving the RAM settings in BIOS on auto (which results in 2666 MHz speed for the RAM), but the crashes remain. For the GPU I have tried it with the normal and OC BIOS of the FTW3.

I am really at a loss here. The only things I have not tried are using different CPU or GPU. I could use my old GPU (also an EVGA, 2080 TI FTW3), but I would have to get it back from a friend whom I borrowed it to.

Together with said friend I have searched the internet, but you find so many case of black screen crashes with sound still playing, even as far back as 2016, and with a lot of different hardware combinations. My friend tries to cheer me up by saying that it might not be a hardware issue, but I am not that optimistic at this point.

Windows event viewer only shows me errors because of the system being restarted unexpectedly.

This is a huge wall of text but, as I said, I am out of ideas. One thing I could do is trying it with my old GPU. But other than that, I am absolutely clueless.

Thanks for reading and I hope someone has an idea.

DracoCW · April 23, 2021

No one any idea what else could be the problem? Have get crashes even with a new Windows installation without anything else installed but graphics and chipset drivers and minimum connected devices.

Getwrong · April 30, 2021

I have the same issue, still have absolutely no clue. The problem is completely random, sometimes during game play and sometimes just happened out of nowhere. The screen either freeze or turned black. Kinda desperate now

Cask · May 24, 2021

Same problem here. 5900X, Crosshair VIII and a 3080. I am getting black screens not blue screens. Need to turn my pc back on. Only in Red Dead does this happen.

DracoCW · May 29, 2021

Sorry for not posting anything. I found out that apparently the issue is caused by PCIe 4.0. If i have PCIe set to "Auto" or "4. Gen" in the BIOS then I got the black screens. I startet a RMA for my graphics card because I seriously thought it caused the issue since the same crash happened with my card in a friends computer. He has the same CPU as I do and I think the crash happened on his machine because he too had PCIe 4.0 set to "Auto" or "4. Gen" in Bios.

After I started the RMA I tried it with my old Intel Mainboard (Z270 Asus Maximus IX Formula) and my old CPU (i7 7700K) and lo and behold! No crashes. Since then I have downgraded the BIOS on my AMD mainboard (the crashes also happened after updating the BIOS) and manually set ALL PCIe settings to 3. Gen (not just PCIe slots for graphics cards but even the ones for NMVE drives). No more crashes since then.

It still puzzles me that you hear almost nothing about this from the big tech youtubers (or at least I have not seen any of them covering this issue). I still do not know if this issue has to be resolved by AMD (BIOS or Chipset fix) or Nvidia, but I hope whoever has to fix this will fix this SOON.

So, if any of you experience the same issues and you have a PCIe 4.0 mainboard, try setting PCIe to 3. Gen in BIOS.

pastagotsauce · August 2, 2021

How far did you go back on your motherboard bios? I have tried switching to gen 3 with a vast array of other fixes and nothing seems to work. The computer decides to work sometimes for a short amount of time (days or weeks even) but eventually stops working again. I tried going back a couple bios versions and testing different driver versions with Gen 3 on and havnt been able to get it to work yet. I assume there might be a perfect combination of bios versions/driver versions for my specific setup (5800x + 3070 strix). Any help would be MUCH appreciated.