All of a sudden a black screen, not crash but no response

D

Hi all,
Over the last week or two every so often while I playing games (never happens if just browsing or typing) all of a sudden without warning the monitor will go black. No error message, blue screen, or strange noises.
I checked the reliability monitor to see if there was an issue but nothing, doesn't even show a crash, no minidump.

The sound continues, so if I was listening to spotify, the music will keep playing, or the background noise or action sounds from the game will keep going.
There are no beeps during the startup so I am assuming no RAM issues.
The power to the monitor is still there it is as if there is no signal.

SO far I have:

I checked my graphics drivers, they were up to date.
I rolled back to the previous driver.
I opened the box up and used compressed gas to clear the dust bunnies.
I switched to a different monitor and cable issue continues.
I downloaded CPUID Hardware monitor, to have a look and temperatures fan speed and current.

At this stage I am guessing at a heat issue???
Is there a program that will continue to monitor heat/current and write to a log file even if the system crashes?

Any ideas?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

yoyo

AMD video card by any chance? Had this issue previously with my HD7850. Not sure if it's hardware related but I found that completely erasing the driver using DDU before installing the latest did help. Do try a clean driver install using DDU and reinstall the latest non-beta driver and see if it helps

Nick

Marcface

yoyo wrote: »

AMD video card by any chance? Had this issue previously with my HD7850. Not sure if it's hardware related but I found that completely erasing the driver using DDU before installing the latest did help. Do try a clean driver install using DDU and reinstall the latest non-beta driver and see if it helps

Nick

I'm not sure about this, if it were the video card the driver would recover (usually crashing the game or minimizing it). If the OP is using HDMI and it is the card that crashes, the sound would go. You may have had a bad card as they're very reliable these days, I'm still running my 7970 and wouldn't change it at all. Just my two cents.

yoyo

Marcface wrote: »

I'm not sure about this, if it were the video card the driver would recover (usually crashing the game or minimizing it). If the OP is using HDMI and it is the card that crashes, the sound would go. You may have had a bad card as they're very reliable these days, I'm still running my 7970 and wouldn't change it at all. Just my two cents.

I had the same issue. It's very odd the sound keeps going but the signal to monitor is lost. Only way to recover is to hard reset the machine. Haven't noticed the issue since I changed video card. But I do recall clean driver installations being beneficial

Nick

TerrorFirmer

Not saying it's the issue but there was a known black screen issue with some AMD cards - I had it on two of mine, the screen would cut to black but background noise would continue - this only happens in games not normal desktop use, and happened regularly, sometimes after 20 minutes, sometimes 90 minutes. My cards were both early R9 290's. They were replaced and were perfect afterwards.

yoyo

TerrorFirmer wrote: »

Not saying it's the issue but there was a known black screen issue with some AMD cards - I had it on two of mine, the screen would cut to black but background noise would continue - this only happens in games not normal desktop use, and happened regularly, sometimes after 20 minutes, sometimes 90 minutes. My cards were both early R9 290's. They were replaced and were perfect afterwards.

Sounds very like the issue I had. Happened mainly in Metro 2033. Didn't happen at all in some games like Battlefield 4. Always believed it to be software but maybe it was the hardware.
I replaced the card a while back and haven't had any such issues with the new card!

Nick

D

Thanks for the responses.
Its an old Geforce GT230 (really old have been putting off upgrading as I am working through older games) thing is that the current driver has been out for a while and games that were stable are now unstable.

If it is the card then that is the final excuse/reason to spring for a new one. But I just want to rule everything out first.

Like I asked earlier is there any program that will write log files as it goes incase there is a crash?

yoyo

D wrote: »

Like I asked earlier is there any program that will write log files as it goes incase there is a crash?

GPUz can do that!

Nick

D

So turns out it was the card overheating.
Had a better look at it and some dust/lint had blocked the airflow over the cooling/heat exchanger.
Pair of tweezers sorted it.
Thanks for all the help.

Marcface

D wrote: »

So turns out it was the card overheating.
Had a better look at it and some dust/lint had blocked the airflow over the cooling/heat exchanger.
Pair of tweezers sorted it.
Thanks for all the help.

Good man, glad to hear you got it sorted