Intermittent black screens (no restarts) and low lane count on my Sapphire Pulse RX 580, a dying card?

[emothxughts]

(PC specs: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/dssMW4)

 

For months I've been dealing with unending WHEA 18 crashes & restarts on my PC, as documented in my other thread here, and I ultimately deduced that the culprit is my second hand RX5600XT card, since my other cards the Sapphire Pulse RX580 (also second hand, and the topic of this thread) and the Sapphire Pulse RX550 (bought brand new...in 2021) never gave me the WHEA 18 error and in fact I never even heard of such an error till that fateful RX5600XT came in the mail. I have since returned that card for warranty...again.

 

Now I can focus on the other problem card, the RX580. The first problem is that it occasionally black screens, as in the monitor just turns off instead of blank black pixels. This mostly happens in games, but can also happen in desktop, and not even at high GPU temps either, though it does also blackscreen at high temps like for example 83C. When it does happen, all my PC lights are still on and the sound from whatever game I'm playing continues (no stuttering or buzzing). My GPU fans do stop however, it never goes into 100% speed like so many other cases. Of course there's nothing else I can do but long press the power button. As I mentioned before, this GPU does not give me a WHEA 18 Cache Hierarchy Error in the Event Viewer after restarting my PC, and in fact my only errors are Event 41s (which merely means the PC isn't shut down properly, practically meaningless).

 

Next is that it's currently running only on x4 PCIe lanes, instead of the x16 that it's supposed to be (not to be confused with going from Pcie 1.1 to Pcie 3.0 speeds and back). This happened when I put it in an ASUS Prime K-II B450M mobo, it also happened when I put it in my current Asrock B450M Steel Legend, so this has got to be a card issue. Strangely it doesn't affect framerates much, I can still play games at 60fps with this card when it doesn't blackscreen of course. But really, x4 lanes only??

 

Last but not least, sometimes it outright doesn't output display at all. This last happened when I swapped my mobo and installed this card on the Asrock mobo the first time around. My other two cards output display straight away, this RX580 didn't, such that i thought it was dead. It was only the second time yesterday that i installed this card and it output display.

 

Troubleshooting steps I've done in the past, doesn't help:

• DDU'd drivers and installed the latest WHQL drivers.
• Updated BIOS and chipset drivers on both mobos
• Reseat the card, clean the contacts.. The lanes cut down problem returns a few days afterwards, and sometimes the card won't output display.
• Repasted the GPU.
• Check PSU cable connection. It's plugged into the card as tightly as possible.
• Sent for repairs (warranty's long expired), the only problem they encountered was faulty HDMI ports (I don't use DP, don't have a monitor with DP), they replaced them. Nope, still blackscreens sometimes.
• Not actually troubleshooting, but when it comes to artifacts, I only ever see it artifact in Elden Ring (great game, not the best PC port), in the form of flashes of scrambled colours. No such artifacts in any other game.

With the aforementioned RX5600XT returned, this is the most powerful GPU I have. What are the chances that this GPU is dying and/or on its last legs? What else can I do to solve the problems I described about this card?

 

 

[emothxughts]

Bump:

 

I am on the very latest driver the 23.2.2. I have played Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd on this RX580 after I made the post. No blackscreens and my GPU struggles to go above 60C.

 

Still anxious about this card blackscreening, any ideas why it does so and also why is it only running on x4 lanes? I'm putting it in the top GPU slot, the one closest to CPU. And no, clicking on the question mark in GPU-Z only increases PCIE speed from 1.1 to 3.0, does nothing about the lane count.

[Xkillerpn]

What PSU do you have, rx580 its not that powerfull but still uses some power. If its a crapy PSU you can have those issues. 

 

Now, Did you try a diferent cable on you rmonitor, or if you can change hdmi to dysplay port or the other way around. Use  a good cable 

[emothxughts]

4 hours ago, Xkillerpn said:

What PSU do you have, rx580 its not that powerfull but still uses some power. If its a crapy PSU you can have those issues. 

 

Now, Did you try a diferent cable on you rmonitor, or if you can change hdmi to dysplay port or the other way around. Use  a good cable 

The PSU is Cooler Master MWE Bronze V2 650W, the 230V version, it's tier C in the PSU tierlist (not to be confused with the full range version that's tier B, I wonder why they're in different tiers...). My other PSU...let's just say it's Tier E, not worth mentioning. (Buyer's regret there). In any case, they're both non-modular, so no replacing cables.

 

My monitor only has an HDMI port and a D-Sub port, using DP is out of the question. I do have a DP-to-HDMI cable, but that won't display anything past the BIOS screen. (2 more buyer's regrets right there). I have 2 HDMI cables, including the one I'm using right now, and that's the best one. The last time I sent this card for repairs, the shop says my issues were faulty and overheating HDMI ports (their words). They fixed the two ports. I still get blackscreens occasionally (without self-restarting and WHEAs) afterwards, and it's running at x4 lanes only now.

[Fendrick]

The PSU tier list is to be taken with some grain of salt as it don't take into account the fact that well performing older models with a so-called inferior topology never caused problems for people on newer systems yet were just pushed into certain tiers based on theory, not facts or actual testing.

 

This is not a PSU issue.

 

The Radeon 5000 series suffered greatly with black screen issues, simply put, get rid and either buy Radeon 6000 or better or a GeForce GPU.

[emothxughts]

Figures the PSU isn't really an issue, the RX5600XT is less power hungry than the RX580, yet the former crashes with a restart and WHEA 18, while the latter just cuts off display with everything else running. Hope I can refund the RX5600XT if my country's warranty terms allows it...

 

But back to the RX580, it's stuck in x4 lanes even in the top slot of the new mobo, with its lanes set to x16 in the BIOS. Why is that so? I could take it out and clean the RX580's contacts again, but the last time I did, the contacts were clean and so were the contacts on the old mobo.

 

I can still game on it though, 60+ fps at that...

[starsmine]

Ill through another option on what it could be.

The monitor itself. I have a monitor, through multiple GPUs(3 nvidia, 1 amd), and multiple builds just blank randomly (with different cables as well, and different cable types (dvi-d/hdmi)). I have RMAed it, but the problem is intermittent so they never found an issue and was sent back to me, I have just lived with it (its only ever used as a secondary anyways). Though some cables its worse then others. I suspect the receiver on the monitor is not fully up to the spec it should be so it just desynchs itself. 

one time it blanked for a week... which was when I RMAed it. all the other times it was only a few seconds

I have no explanation on the pcie lane issue

Honestly sounds like a confluence of problems. I know someone brought up dirt power to PC in previous thread, Do you run an UPS at all?

[emothxughts]

8 minutes ago, starsmine said:

Ill through another option on what it could be.

The monitor itself. I have a monitor, through multiple GPUs(3 nvidia, 1 amd), and multiple builds just blank randomly (with different cables as well, and different cable types (dvi-d/hdmi)). I have RMAed it, but the problem is intermittent so they never found an issue and was sent back to me, I have just lived with it (its only ever used as a secondary anyways). Though some cables its worse then others. I suspect the receiver on the monitor is not fully up to the spec it should be so it just desynchs itself. 

one time it blanked for a week... which was when I RMAed it. all the other times it was only a few seconds

I have no explanation on the pcie lane issue

Is the monitor one without a Displayport? Mine is a cheapo LG monitor (LG400MP) that has 1080p 75Hz FreeSync specs but no DP for whatever reason, only HDMI and D-Sub. I use an HDMI-HDMI cable for it of course. Before that it was an even more cheapo 2nd hand Dell 1080p 60Hz office monitor with VGA & DVI ports only.

 

And speaking of blanking out, on all my AMD cards, sometimes when I install or reinstall the drivers, my monitor (the LG one) blackscreens and turns on again (which is normal), but the screen will stay black (as in backlights on, not completely turned off) until I force restart my PC. After restarting, the drivers turn out to be already installed.

[starsmine]

Just now, emothxughts said:

Is the monitor one without a Displayport? Mine is a cheapo LG monitor (LG400MP) that has 1080p 75Hz FreeSync specs but no DP for whatever reason, only HDMI and D-Sub. I use an HDMI-HDMI cable for it of course. Before that it was an even more cheapo 2nd hand Dell 1080p 60Hz office monitor with VGA & DVI ports only.

 

And speaking of blanking out, on all my AMD cards, sometimes when I install or reinstall the drivers, my monitor (the LG one) blackscreens and turns on again (which is normal), but the screen will stay black (as in backlights on, not completely turned off) until I force restart my PC. After restarting, the drivers turn out to be already installed.

yea its an el cheapo asus 1080p 60hz tn panel I got on clearance, no DP, only DVI-D and VGA inputs (when I said HDMI that was off the CPU, and DVI-D is pin compatable) 
RMAing it was not worth at all cause shipping costs (which while cheaper then replacing it, still was damn close to what I payd for it)

I will say the screen turning off an the backlight being on was something I had my fancy new Gigabyte monitor do. It was a firmware setting with the auto input selection. The backlight just NEVER turned off for the first 6 months of me owning it, Basically the mux got confused with however that was codded.