Black screen mid gaming.

[TFord]

Hello everyone.

Having an issue with my new build! Mid game around 3 times now I've had the screen go completely black (on both monitors I have), monitor will then display lack of input signal. I can hear the game sounds and have even continued a chat via skype with a friend for around 5-10 minutes or so (before force rebooting).

I've an Asus Strix 970. When screen does go black, I hear the typical removed device noise that windows makes and checking Event Viewer Log shows 'device driver stopped responding and didn't recover'.

I've had plenty of long gaming sessions (6 hours +) with out issue, black outs arn't specific to one game only and genuinely seem to happen randomly.

Things I tried so far:

Changing the 8 pin connector incase of faulty psu 8 pin.
Monitored temps for prolonged time under load. (Gpu never broke 67/8c and cpu sat at 38c)
Rolling back drivers.
Swapping Ram to new channels and testing ram sticks indiviually.
Replicating the problem by intentionally running GPU/CPU intesive benchmarks (unigine, prime95 etc). To no success.

Anyone had this issue before? Last ditch effort before I return the card as faulty

Thanks for your time.

 

[itchy]

Try a single monitor and see if it happens.

I have strange quirk sometimes when booting with duel monitors.

It could be your monitor, check your monitors and it would be helpful to tell us what monitors you are using, cables and resolutions?

 

[TFord]

Try a single monitor and see if it happens.

I have strange quirk sometimes when booting with duel monitors.

It could be your monitor, check your monitors and it would be helpful to tell us what monitors you are using, cables and resolutions?

Thanks for the reply, hadn't thought of trying just one monitor.

I have 2 LG Flatrons IPS 2345V, which are connected via DVI and HDMI (1080p). I've had them both for a little while and used them on my previous build with out issue. Certainely something to look into though!

 

[Bonjour]

Have you tried uninstalling the drivers, running DDU and doing a clean driver install?

I've had similar issues in the past when cards have been overclocked and / or aren't getting enough volts

 

[Nasher]

This is the crash a lot of people get with modern GPUs. Normally it's caused by the card being unstable on boost clocks. You will find that more intensive games trigger it far more often. Check event ID and you will most likely see loads errors about the device not being connected after it occurs. I suspect the method the manufacturers are using to determine the card's max speed is flawed.

MANY nvidia cards seem to suffer from it and have done for years, including my 970 and a 670 I had a couple of years ago. The only fix is to modify the BIOS on it and enable the boost limit (I set mine to the advertised speed of the card and it's now totally stable) :/

It's hard to find any info on it because it's a tricky one to diagnose. Took me ages to pin it down. You can keep RMAing until you get a perfect one, but the chances are you will get others with the same issue.