Random black screens - whats causing them?

Morgy

Morgy

Morgy

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Joined
29 Nov 2007
Posts
43
Hi,

I've had my new build now for nearly 3 weeks, and until now it's been running just fine. However, a few days ago I started getting this thing where the monitor goes all black for a second then immediately comes back. It's been occasional and irregular, and has probably happened about 7-8 times in the past 3-4 days or so. Apart from this my rig has been fine and has been running TF2 and the CoD4 demo superbly.

I've got an 8800 GT and a Q6600 running on Vista 64 bit, and i have downloaded all the latest drivers for my graphics, sound and motherboard chipset, and nothing is overclocked. Two of these black screens have occurred when I was just browsing the web and the temps on the card are fine, so I assumed it was a monitor problem. However after swapping round my monitor and cables round with my brother's the problem is still there. I reseated the graphics card in the slot just to be sure it's nice and snug in there but have still got a few blackouts. My power supply is a corsair HX 620W modular power supply, so i'm sure I've got enough power.

Anyone have any ideas as to what the problem is? It could be a bad card but apart from this my games all run superbly and the problem has only started recently, so I'm really quite confused. Any help would be much appreciated.
 
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It does sound like a graphics card problem to me since you've eliminate the monitor and the cables. It might be worth seeing if you can get hold of a display adaptor just to see if that is your problem. If you can that is.

Make sure too that the power being supplied too is stable and correct. Might be worth check the voltages just to be on the safe side. Check the PCI-e power using a multimet to see if they are supplying the correct voltages.

Lastly, it could be the motherboard itself. You'll only know this for sure if you have checked the PSU supply and swapped out the graphics card for a known working one.
 
Well I hope it's just a driver problem, and if so that would explain why it's only started happening just recently if a Vista update messed things up. I'll try downloading the 169.28 beta drivers then and see if that improves things. Is it also worth re-downloading directX?
 
Morgy said:
Well I hope it's just a driver problem, and if so that would explain why it's only started happening just recently if a Vista update messed things up. I'll try downloading the 169.28 beta drivers then and see if that improves things. Is it also worth re-downloading directX?
Click to expand...
no direct-x is built into vista :)
 
Well I've just remembered that when installing th CoD4 demo it asked me to reinstall directx, and I certainly didn't have any problems before then and they may very well have started shortly after. I'm redownloading directx now just in case.
 
After reformatting my computer and only using the drivers I was originally using, it's still happening. Any ideas?
 
long shot, but the power connection, or the dvi input where they hook up to the monitor could be loose/not screwwed in properly, so every now and then you loose power or what ever.

you probly thought of that already though :p
 
hmmm fyi i had a powercolour radeon 9800 xt many moons ago
that done exactly the same thing roughly a month after that BANG dead card !
 
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