Windows 10 Desktop Flashing...

[Beowulf83]

Ok, I'm fairly proficient with computers, but this problem has me stumped. First off, the specs...

 

- AMD FX-8350 4.0 Ghz CPU

- ASRock Fatal1ty 990FX Motherboard

- 16GB Corsair Vengeance 2400 Memory

- Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 8GB GPU

- Samsung 850 500GB SSD

- Windows 10 Pro, latest updates

 

Story time, and please bare with me, there's quite a bit... This is my old system I gave to my son after I built a new one. It's been running great, no issues until a few days ago. It started not waking from sleep fully, the system would turn on but no display. I restarted it, worked fine, but then my son said the screen is flashing on and off. I checked it out, restarted it and it did the same thing. Blank screen flashing on and off with an occasional white border around everything else that's blacked out. I then booted into safe mode and everything worked fine except for no GPU obviously. I decided to run DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) and reinstall the drivers which worked great until I restarted it again and the same thing happened, flashing screen. I then thought it might be a driver issue so I rolled back the GPU drivers but still the same thing happened. I have Linux installed on a separate drive so I booted into that to test the hardware and everything worked perfectly. I now know it's not a hardware issue, must be software, but what? I decided to nuke and pave the Windows 10 drive, updated everything, reinstalled the GPU drivers, rebooted and much to my chagrin, the same exact flashing blank screen with a white border around everything. Needless to say I'm very frustrated now... The only other thing I can think of is the latest Windows updates, maybe there's some sort of conflict somewhere, or as in typical Microsoft style and their prejudice against older hardware, they're trying to force me to upgrade lol. I really don't know what else to do... Any ideas??

 

[OddOod]

Welcome to the forums!

Can you try a different GPU?

 

Also, that's a decade old platform, we are well into the other side of the bathtub curve, could be any number of failing hardware pieces 

[Beowulf83]

N/A

Edited May 19, 2022 by Beowulf83
Forgot to quote the post I was replying to

[Beowulf83]

55 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Welcome to the forums!

Can you try a different GPU?

 

Also, that's a decade old platform, we are well into the other side of the bathtub curve, could be any number of failing hardware pieces 

Yeah, I was thinking it was the GPU failing, but it works fine with the basic Windows drivers and it works in Linux as well... I'll try an old RX 550 I have in storage... somewhere...

[Beowulf83]

Well SOB! It's the damn GPU! The RX 550 worked wonderfully... Well, guess my boy is gonna have to lower his detail settings... Maybe I'll stalk eBay for a cheap replacement or upgrade for him...

[OddOod]

On 5/19/2022 at 12:19 PM, Beowulf83 said:

Well SOB! It's the damn GPU! The RX 550 worked wonderfully... Well, guess my boy is gonna have to lower his detail settings... Maybe I'll stalk eBay for a cheap replacement or upgrade for him...

GPU problems sometimes only present themselves when running full bore. Probably time to shuffle the old card off to freegeek or similar with a postit about the issue.