EVGA 3080 XC3 Ultra - Black screens

[KillerFry]

Hello, there.

 

I've was lucky to get a spot on the 3080 XC3 Ultra queue and have had the card since November last year without a problem... until now.

 

About a month ago I was playing HotS (Heroes of the Storm) when the screen suddenly went black. I could still hear my teammates on discord, they could hear me fine, but apparently I disconnected from the game. At first I thought it was a driver crash, but the screen never came back. I had to do the one finger salute. After a reboot I rejoined the match and all was well for a few weeks, when it began to turn into a common issue. It happened at least one time during the first match of every game. Since it got annoying, I took a look at the Event Viewer to see if there was anything there... but no, there's nothing. (Yes, there is, something about a webcam frame server thing... but it is not related.) HotS is not a GPU demanding game - more CPU heavy. Eventually, it happened randomly several times a match. Then it began happening in FF XIV, Cyberpunk, and more; to the point that now I can't event start up GPU heavy games.

 

I have a 5900X with an Asus Strix X570-E Gaming. I had recently upgraded the BIOS to 4002 which supposedly helped with the USB problems 570X's seem to be having. I have all the USB ports populated and indeed, sometimes the USB DAC would disconnect. Thinking that was the issue I rolled back to 3604 with which I had not had any problem other than random USB disconnects.The GPU issue was still happening - actually, I'm still on the 3604 BIOS; what I did is I disconnected all USB devices I was not using to see if that helped. But no, it didn't.

 

Then I went and changed all PCIe lanes to Gen 3, just to be sure. Nope, problem still there. Then I took the PCIe NMVe drive I had, making sure to just leave the GPU plugged in. Problem still there.

 

I have a secondary PC I use in my living room for couch gaming and VR with a 2080 Ti. So what I did was put the 2080 Ti on my main PC and the 3080 on the living room PC. Uninstalled drivers with DDU and installed them back on. And I have not had a problem with any of them since. This living room PC has an AMD 3600 and an Asus 470X-I.

 

So... the only variable I think I have to check but don't know how since I don't have spares around, is the PSU. The main PC has a EVGA SuperNOVA 850 G2 from 2016; the living room PC is an ITX system, so it is rocking a Fractal Design Ion SFX 650G. Which is interesting because for a second there I thought the "small" 650W PSU would not be enough to drive the 3080. Oh, and on the main PC I have a 4K display, while the living room is using a 1080p TV - I know, I know... I need a TV upgrade... I don't know if the TV not demanding as much power from the GPU keeps it from pulling too much power.

 

Anyway... is there a way I could pin point if the 850W PSU is the culprit? I don't want to needlessly buy a PSU in this current market. I wouldn't think 5 years is out of a PSU's lifespan but I don't know what else to point to. Because if it's not that, then I guess I'd have to RMA the GPU... which would be a bummer.

 

Thanks for any advice!

 

Edit: Oh, and yes, I have always used two separate cables to plug the GPU to the PSU

 

Edit 2: Just in case, I have 4 sticks of 8GB Crucial Ballistix 3600 MHz DDR4 running at... 3600MHz, hah! No overclocks there. Heck, there's no overclocks anywhere, not the CPU nor GPU. I tried running the RAM without DOCP which puts it at 2600 MHz, and even tried only using 2 sticks since I know having all 4 sometimes make computers misbehave. No change on the GPU issues.

[jones177]

These may be driver crashes.

 

Try Precision X1

It may have a bios update for your card.

 

Try Debug mode.

It is in the Nvidia Control Panel under the Help tab.

 

 

 

 

[KillerFry]

1 hour ago, jones177 said:

These may be driver crashes.

 

Try Precision X1

It may have a bios update for your card.

 

Try Debug mode.

It is in the Nvidia Control Panel under the Help tab.

 

 

 

 

I've tried Precision X1 - the latest bios update for the card was back when ReBAR was enabled.

 

Regarding debug mode, will it write a log file or is it some kind of "safe mode"? Or I guess my question is, once in debug mode, what will I be looking for? If it crashes while it debug it definitely is the hardware; if it doesn't then it's probably the driver?
 

By the by, this began to happen in 466.77 and continued during 471.11, and the new 471.41. I've tried all three of them driver versions and it keeps happening. I actually reverted to 466.77 which is what I have installed right now.

[jones177]

Precision X1 also had a fix for the Windows black screen bug.

For more info check out the EVGA 30 series forum.

I did since my XC3 Ultra 3080 ti was experiencing black screens but it turned out to be an HDMI 2.1/OLED issue that was fixed by a certified HDMI 2.1 cable.

 

Debug mode is the Nvidia default so it will remove any EVGA factory overclock and settings. If the card runs fine in debug mode then the issue is with EVGA factory settings.

The XC ultra has a boost clock of 1755mhz and the Nvidia default is 1710mhz so the card will run at a lower clock and use less power.

 

I have had several other issues with black screens.

 

My i9 10900k/2080 ti computer was getting black screens while gaming that steadily got worse. The computer ran but the card did not.  It turned out to be the 24 pin motherboard cable. I found the problem by accidently touching the cable and the screen went blank. A new cable fixed it.