No display on startup

[JZStudios]

I have a 960 running 3 monitors, which I know is underpowered but it works enough for me.

Anyways, one day I made the unfortunate mistake of trying to use the Nvidia Control panel to do... well anything, but specifically to set it up for triple screen surround. This immediately caused all my monitors to go dark. I had to restart the computer and they remained dark and claimed no input on boot-up. I messed around with plugging/unplugging the cables and got them in working order again. I assumed the issue was dealt with as long as I avoid using surround, this assumption was apparently wrong. I just restarted and again all my monitors kept showing up black, I unplugged them all, plugged them back in, tried one at a time, rebooted a lot... It would APPEAR that for some reason unplugging power from the monitor and back in solved the issue, but I have no idea why that would be the case.

2 of my monitors are HDMI, and the third is DVI. I assume that unplugging the monitor solves the issue because I singled out the DVI and rebooted to black, but after a pwr cycle on monitor it works. Anyone have any ideas? Much less any idea why Nvidia control panel would start this fiasco?

[Tabs]

8 minutes ago, JZStudios said:

I have a 960 running 3 monitors, which I know is underpowered but it works enough for me.

Anyways, one day I made the unfortunate mistake of trying to use the Nvidia Control panel to do... well anything, but specifically to set it up for triple screen surround. This immediately caused all my monitors to go dark. I had to restart the computer and they remained dark and claimed no input on boot-up. I messed around with plugging/unplugging the cables and got them in working order again. I assumed the issue was dealt with as long as I avoid using surround, this assumption was apparently wrong. I just restarted and again all my monitors kept showing up black, I unplugged them all, plugged them back in, tried one at a time, rebooted a lot... It would APPEAR that for some reason unplugging power from the monitor and back in solved the issue, but I have no idea why that would be the case.

2 of my monitors are HDMI, and the third is DVI. I assume that unplugging the monitor solves the issue because I singled out the DVI and rebooted to black, but after a pwr cycle on monitor it works. Anyone have any ideas? Much less any idea why Nvidia control panel would start this fiasco?

Surround is a horribly buggy bit of software, and was clearly a knee-jerk reaction to AMD releasing "EyeFinity". As you probably have barely/never heard of it, you can see how much effort NVidia had to go to to keep Surround in working order.

 

My best piece of advice is to reinstall your drivers, and chose the "clean install" option in the installer when you do. That'll erase all of your configuration settings - including whatever dodgy Surround config is messing up your displays - and hopefully put you back in working order again.

 

If that doesn't fix the issue, then you can use a utility called DDU from Guru3d to completely remove your current driver, every little trace of it, and then you can reinstall the latest one again. Hopefully that won't be needed, but it's an option if the reinstall doesn't work.

 

Just remember to click "Perform a clean installation" on the installer! very important or it'll just carry over your old settings, including the borked surround profile.

[JZStudios]

Oh, I know about both Surround and EyeFinity. I've heard that EyeFinity actually works though. But no, Nvidia much like everything else they make, didn't support it at all, even though it's still an amount of a "selling point."

I'll try doing a reinstall. Not sure why surround started freaking out though, because as annoying as it was before it at least somewhat worked.

[JZStudios]

Performing a "clean install" seems to do the trick, but I'm not sure what exactly started the issue. IT's kind of annoying not being able to use an advertised feature that was a selling point though... maybe I'll try setting up surround again and see if it breaks it again.