Black screens and crashes

hughtrimble · 29 Jul 2016 at 12:42

Afternoon all,

Suddenly, when gaming on a variety of games such as GTA 5, Rust, Verdun, my three screens (not Eyefinity, just gaming on the centre screen, with other things in the flanking screens like Teamspeak and maps on the others) just go black, and there is nothing I can do other than restart the computer, as ctrl+alt+delete etc. does nothing whatsoever. I can still hear and be heard in Teamspeak. This has never happened before, but now suddenly does whenever I'm gaming, but at random points, and not always when actually playing the game, I may even be on the home screen after quitting a server.

I've done a clean install of the AMD drivers for my R9 290 using this guide https://community.amd.com/thread/180667, but that has made no difference.

I'm on Win10 using a Windforce R9 290oc, 8GB RAM and i7-4770k. I've not done any home overclocking of any of the hardware.

Any suggestions as to what to do? Your advice would be much appreciated.

Hugh

Howitzer · 29 Jul 2016 at 13:01

How are your temps?
Perhaps the recent hot weather, possible warm room & case/dust could cause overheating GPU?

hughtrimble · 29 Jul 2016 at 13:04

Howitzer said:
How are your temps?
Perhaps the recent hot weather, possible warm room & case/dust could cause overheating GPU?

I was having a look at Corsair Link for those, and the GPU temp seemed to peak around the 80C mark. Is there a means of getting a graph for temps to see if it's peaking when I'm just not looking at the Link software?

Thank you for your suggestion.

BluD · 29 Jul 2016 at 13:09

Sounds like your driver is crashing which often ends up with a blackscreen on ATI cards nowadays.

Was your windows install a fresh one or an upgrade? Upgrade leads to loads of problems.

I would remove all third party overclocking/monitoring software if you using any then see how that goes as it can cause problems.

If its on a fresh windows install and theres no third party overclocking/monitoring software running and its still back screening i would reinstall AB and monitor your temps in games and check its not overheating.

THe only other thing i would look at is background programs, sometimes antivirus software and load up and cause your game to lose focus which can lead to black screens also.

hughtrimble · 29 Jul 2016 at 13:20

BluD said:
Sounds like your driver is crashing which often ends up with a blackscreen on ATI cards nowadays.

I updated the drivers yesterday due to an issue with GTA 5 (large black squares blocking out much of the screen), and that then seemed to bring about the total blackout of the three screens. That's why I then did a clean install of the drivers, but the issue is still persisting.

Maybe I'll revert back to an old version of the drivers?

BluD said:
Was your windows install a fresh one or an upgrade? Upgrade leads to loads of problems.

Upgrade. But I've had no issues of this sort before. Been running just fine for months, but I realise these issues can surface later on with conflicting updates, perhaps?

BluD said:
I would remove all third party overclocking/monitoring software if you using any then see how that goes as it can cause problems.

If its on a fresh windows install and theres no third party overclocking/monitoring software running and its still back screening i would reinstall AB and monitor your temps in games and check its not overheating.

THe only other thing i would look at is background programs, sometimes antivirus software and load up and cause your game to lose focus which can lead to black screens also.

May I ask what AB is? My apologies for not knowing - I've had a Google but no luck.

Edit: And thank you very much indeed for all your suggestions

BluD · 29 Jul 2016 at 20:39

Sorry yeah its MSI afterburner, its the software most people use to overclock and monitor their graphics card, in your case it would be handy to install it and see what temp your getting in games unless you have some other software to monitor it already.

I originally upgraded to windows 10, i had so many problems, i would always suggest a fresh install before you go any further. You can download a USB installer for it. Its up to you but it did solve a lot of problems for me.

hughtrimble · 2 Aug 2016 at 14:34

BluD said:
Sorry yeah its MSI afterburner, its the software most people use to overclock and monitor their graphics card, in your case it would be handy to install it and see what temp your getting in games unless you have some other software to monitor it already.

I originally upgraded to windows 10, i had so many problems, i would always suggest a fresh install before you go any further. You can download a USB installer for it. Its up to you but it did solve a lot of problems for me.

Under load playing Rust it seems the GPU runs around 80C - that sort of temperature cause instability? Not overclocked by yours truly.

Rather than using the third party AMD driver uninstall tool again which I linked to above, I used AMD's own, and no more black screening or unusual instability (Rust is not stable anyway).

Seems solved, for now! Thank you again for your help.