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290X Blank Screen

BIG Phil

BIG Phil

BIG Phil

Associate
Joined
6 Jan 2007
Posts
70
Just over two weeks ago I bought an MSI Radeon R9 290X Lightning Edition from OcUK.

For a week and a half it worked very well apart from sounding a little like a hand dryer when playing games with all video settings at their highest. BF4, Alien Isolation etc all worked fine.

However, in the past few days, whilst idling or web browsing (i.e. Christmas shopping) my system has started to suddenly switch to a blank screen from which it is unable to recover. Whenever the blank screen hits, the GPU fans would jump to full power (sounding a little like a jet aircraft is trying to land) and shortly afterwards the system would stop responding.

The blank screen has become more and more frequent such that now the graphics card is not even recognised by my motherboard (Gigabyte EX58-UD3R) and I receive a long beep at POST (which I am told means the graphics card/RAM is not being recognised) and no DVI signal on my two 1080p monitors.

I have re-seated the card a dozen times. Once or twice I got the card to POST but as soon as Windows tried to load, the screen went blank. I would try the card in the 2nd 16x PCI-E slot but unless I remove everything from my case, I do not believe the card would fit.

I have also tried the little BIOS switch on the card but neither setting works.

I have a Corsair AX 860W "80 Plus Platinum" PSU which I am led to believe should be sufficient. I was using two 8-pin cables from the PSU as in the instructions.

My old HD 6950 which the 290X was supposed to replace is back in my system working happily now with no blank screen issues.

I have recently changed my CPU to a Xeon x5650 and added an Aquaero 5 LT as a fan controller but these were installed either before or at the same time as the new GPU and everything worked fine together for over a week.

I am pretty resigned to sending the card back for RMA but can anyone advise on anything obvious I might have missed please?

Many thanks.
 
i think my first port of call would be check the latest motherboard bios, im no expert but the black screens could be down the the gpu memory being faulty, might also be worth trusting amdmatt for help on any ccc settings that might help
 
Thanks.

MB BIOS is the latest stable version (albeit that version is now 2 years old). There are newer beta versions but I have not tried them.
 
This is really weird but I had to send my MSI R9 290 back to overclockers after 8 months of use with no problems ! As soon as I updated to the NEW AMD Drivers ( NOT OMEGA ONES ) and started playing dragon age inquisition on ultra settings my Screen went black and every time i tried to reboot my pc it would bring up blue memory screen and crash with AMD driver issue , I deleted the drivers in safe mode and the pc would load up but as soon as I tried to install drivers it would crash , If you look all over the net a **** load of people have had simular issues with this card the past month and my guess is this new driver is not running the fans on the cards and then causing the memory to get fried !
thats only a guess but it seems a little odd that so many people have had to RMA there R9 290 cards , Only overclockers could confirm how many they have had back the past 2 weeks.
This happend to me on the 11th Dec with the same issue you mentioned above ! I have RMA mine and I am now waiting for a replacement , Prob in the NEW YEAR :(
 
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Black screen is often a driver issue or too high core voltage.

There has to at all times be a direct relationship between the 0.95v Rail and the core voltage of the chip. If these are out of sync black screen. This is why all my benching cards have the 0.95v rails set at 1.25-1.35v then you can push 1.6 core volts with no black screen issue.

If your rolling back drivers make sure to clean the registry etc in safe mode before installing prev ones again

I would try roiling back to previous drivers no overclock and check your on normal bios not LN2 on that card.
 
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Thanks for the suggestions. It is interesting to hear that others have had issues with this.

I never actually overclocked the card beyond the manufacturer overclock. I didn't touch any of the settings until after the blank screens started and one suggested solution I found was to downclock the memory and change a setting in MSI's Afterburner software to force a constant voltage which I did. It made no difference - the blank screens just kept getting worse.

I did also check if it was due to the dodgy MS update (KB3004394) but I could not see that as having been installed.

I can try removing the drivers again (I did so once using DDU in safe mode but then installed the Omega version of AMD's drivers) but given that the card is rarely recognised by the motherboard (i.e. it does not get beyond POST), does that not indicate something more fundamental is now wrong with it?
 
What I did was a complete reinstall and it didn't make any difference , everything worked perfect with all Windows update and motherboard driver drivers ect but as soon as I went & downloaded the AMD Driver from the website my PC would not boot , I would get a Blue Screen with ATI******SYS Error - I even tried old ones from around the net , and the driver on its own with no joy, I doubt ill ever get told what is wrong with it as overclockers have said to me they are waiting for a replacement and then will ship it to me.

I have installed an old AMD HD Graphics card from about 5 years ago and everything is running how it should so my guess is my card was defective or it could be my PSU is not working as it should , We will see what happends when I get a replacement back and I will advise on hear.
 
Gaminig Evolved Gforce Experience all that stuff absolute junk!! Dont install yes this can be one cause on both sides.
 
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