Black screen of death

[Nix1]

So here's what's up,

A little bit over a year ago I decided to build my own PC and to make it short I did. I watched a lot of yt videos on how to build it, followed every step by step and even took an inspiration from a build I saw online and followed their steps, everything was brand new except the graphics card which was my fathers colleague's which as he states was barely used and even had a warranty (still does). Upon installing windows and all the drivers and software's needed everything looked fine until I got that first "black screen of death" Im not sure whet it first happened or how but I thought it was nothing more than just some freeze or a bug. I clean installed the drivers it somewhat went away but as time passed the issue returned. At first I noticed how sometimes while watching youtube the video's would start to stutter (sound as well) for a duration of about a 1.5 sec. and by the time I could react or see what is happening it would be over, and sometimes I could see weird graphical glitches such as white boxes for no longer than 0.5 sec on the web and other apps such as Office Word. It got really bad at some point that it was almost impossible to play game's and after that I started poking around. I went into bios (even though I already beforehand enabled xmp etc.) and completely reset it to default did all the drivers again with a clean install and I even installed a bunch of software such as HWmonitor and other to check my gpu bios. No issue was found everything worked fine (on paper), no overheating etc. until I downloaded a free benchmark test (I'm not sure but I think it was UserBenchmark). And as a normal person I started doing all the tests including cpu and gpu and found an interesting problem. The test ran from dx9 all the way to dx11 and as soon as it got to the dx11 (space jellyfish test) 9 out of 10 times at the exact same point it went to the black screen of death with max fan spin and display not found and after every time i had to restart the PC since there was no way out of it (I tried unplugging the DP and plugging it back in etc.), nothing worked except restart. So to get to the point of it someone please help me as i really don't want to spent another 1000+$ on a new gpu im not sure if its software related or is the gpu just bad. I'm gonna list the pc specs below.

-Also I have a 850W gold plus Psu and nothing was overclocked and the cables going to the gpu are two separate cables (as it should be 2x8pin connector) and even though I considered the psu to be a possible issue the benchmark test persuaded me otherwise. 

-MBO q-code shows no errors except one time the pc didn't properly boot which was a code 40 from returning from sleep (I now have disabled the sleep option and the issue is still there).

Here's the full list of my pc specs: 

MBO- ROG STRIX X570-E GAMING WIFI II

CPU- AMD Ryzen 9 5900X

RAM- 2x G.SKILL 16GB Trident Z Neo DDR4 3600MHz CL16

GPU- TUF Gaming GeForce RTX™ 3080 V2 OC Edition 10GB GDDR6X (supported by a bracket so no gpu sag)

PSU- Cooler Master V850 SFX GOLD (SFX because the case is Lian li O11 dynamic mini)

STORAGE- Samsung 980 Pro 1TB

Cooling- 9x Lian li sl120 Uni fans (connected to a Lian li Hub) 

CPU Cooling - Nzxt Kraken Z53 240 mm (The Lian li fans are mounted on the cpu cooler and the hub is connected to a cpu pin connector which via PWM controls the spin rate) 

 

DISCLAIMER: The GPU does have a warranty, However It was bought in Germany (by the colleague whilst he was staying there) and was afterwards brought to Croatia where I live so there's no possible way of me going to the retail store and getting a refund otherwise I would have already done so. 

 

The files attached are my DxDiag and HwMonitor (the temp are a bit higher than usual as the pc need a spring dust clean). Anyways Please if you can somehow help me or you had a similar issue and know what to do please reach out 

Thank you in advance. 

 

         

DxDiag.txt HWMonitor.txt

.dmp.rar

[ChrisLoudon]

1 hour ago, Nix1 said:

Thank you in advance. 

Hi buddy,

 

A good starting point is to look at your Windows Event Viewer to double check what is going on at the time of the black screen.

 

I've had plenty of these over the years and its almost always the Nvidia Driver crashing and not recovering properly.

 

The next time it black screens, make a note of the time.

Also, when it black screens is the PC completely dead or is it still on and working in the background just without a display. You can usually check this by pressing the Num-Lock key and if the led on the keyboard responds to the presses then the PC hasn't completely crashed.

 

When your at a working desktop search for 'Event Viewer' and navigate to Windows Logs > System.

 

Scroll down to the time stamp that relates to when the black screen occurred and see what's what. You're looking for 1 or multiple entries all reporting that nvlddmkm has stopped working........

 

If you see this then you can probably limit your focus to the GPU.

 

Form what you've said it looks like you covered most bases but I can't see any mention of a fresh install of Windows. A proper clean start will normally rule out a software or driver issue so that would be a good start.

 

Next thing would be to make sure your motherboard BIOS is the most up-to-date version.

 

From here on in having access to a few spare parts and another machine is kinda handy. If you've got another PC you can whack the 4080 into and see if it continues to black screen the you can be 100% certain its a GPU hardware issue and if it work perfectly fine then your in a whole world of misery lol!

 

Do a Google Search for GPU artifacting and see if any of the pics match what you see on screen before it black screens. Artificing is usually a sign of faulty VRAM but the GPU tends to still limp along just with a load of garbage displayed.

 

Don't discount a bad PSU. My last bout of black screens was with a 3080ti. After days of diagnostics I decided to strip the PC down to its bare bones and when I got to unplugging the power cables from the PSU I found that one of the PCIe power cables would unplug from the PSU side. Damn thing was melted to the socket. 

 

If it does turn out to be a GPU issue then I can only recommend you try and RMA it. 

[Nix1]

Hi 

I've tried looking at the event viewer before and now and I didn't find any errors or faults prior to the crash as the event viewer only shows me an error saying: The previous system shutdown at 7:49:01 PM on ‎4/‎3/‎2024 was unexpected.

or critical : The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly. that's more or less it. when it happens again I will look at it more closely but I think it doesn't even register it as an error.

The only information i get before the black screen is an information stating: The start type of the Background Intelligent Transfer Service service was changed from auto start to demand start (and it is 47 minutes before the crash)

 

the reason might be as you said the pc is still working in the background because most of the time I can still hear the in game music or my friends talking in discord, however not always, sometimes just everything dies.

23 hours ago, ChrisLoudon said:

 

 

Also, when it black screens is the PC completely dead or is

it still on and working in the background just without a display. You can usually check this by pressing the Num-Lock key and if the led on the keyboard responds to the presses then the PC hasn't completely crashed.

 

 About the artifacting, yes that was the word I was looking for earlier. those artifact white boxes do appear on my screen, but not while gaming only rarely when scrolling through web sites and sometimes youtube, however they come and go really quickly and if you're not paying attention you can miss it with a blink of an eye.  

On 4/4/2024 at 11:13 AM, ChrisLoudon said:

GPU artifacting

   I guess I can try and check again for loose cable connections or try and check for the damages that may be on the cables. to completely rule out the psu

Thanks. 

 

[ChrisLoudon]

11 minutes ago, Nix1 said:

the reason might be as you said the pc is still working in the background because most of the time I can still hear the in game music or my friends talking in discord, however not always, sometimes just everything dies.

Hi buddy,

 

I'm leaning towards this being a dead or dying GPU that has a VRAM issue. The only thing that would cause me to doubt that would be the lack of any records reporting a crashed driver in the event viewer.

 

Artifacting as you describe does point in that direction.

 

Are you able to pop the card in another machine and recreate the issue?

 

If the problem persists then you can be 100% sure its a faulty card and be confident in a successful RMA.

[ChrisLoudon]

17 minutes ago, Nix1 said:

I guess I can try and check again for loose cable connections or try and check for the damages that may be on the cables. to completely rule out the psu

Thanks. 

 

You could also try running MSI Afterburner and down clocking the VRAM speed (and maybe the core clock as well).

 

It won't fix anything but if underclocking the GPUs VRAM solves the problem albeit with reduced the performance then again, just another bit of ammunition for the RMA process.

[Nix1]

Hi

On 4/5/2024 at 11:49 AM, ChrisLoudon said:

Are you able to pop the card in another machine and recreate the issue?

unfortunately I do not have another PC to stick the GPU in. 

On 4/5/2024 at 11:53 AM, ChrisLoudon said:

You could also try running MSI Afterburner and down clocking the VRAM speed (and maybe the core clock as well).

And I'm not really experienced with clocking, etc. to do that, however I will try and contact the Retail store via Email and explain the issue to see if I can somehow get a replacement card or something. If not I will try and stick with this card as long as it works and in the meantime save for a new rtx 50 series. 

 

Thank you again for sharing the information with me as it really helps me to find the right words to explain what is happening to the retail store.