Black screen of death appears on a fairly recent PC
Black screen of death appears on a fairly recent PC
Hi everyone
Yesterday I experienced an unusual issue with my PC that I had built late last spring. While browsing on Firefox, my screen suddenly went black and then came back, happening repeatedly until I performed a hard shutdown and turned the power off for a short time. After rebooting, the black screen persisted until I changed the DP port on the GPU. During those blackouts, the only icon visible on the taskbar was the Windows logo, with no other shortcuts appearing. Once I regained connectivity, I opened HWMonitor and played a game for 10 minutes—then the screen went black again. I switched DisplayPorts while the PC was running, which resolved the problem. I updated the Nvidia GPU driver from version 572.16 to 572.42 and played continuously for 40 minutes without any performance issues or unusual temperatures on HWMonitor. I also ran several memtest passes overnight with no errors, performed CHKDSK, and everything seemed normal.
Today, I played a few hours of Kingdom Come 2 without any problems.
Here are my system details:
- ASUS Prime Z790-A
- Intel Core i7 13700k
- GeForce RTX 3070
- G.Skill Trident Z Z5 2x 16GB DDR5
- Samsung 980 Pro 1TB
- Corsair RM1000x 1000w
- Windows 11 Home
I’m aware the PSU might be overpowered for my setup, but I plan to upgrade the GPU later. As someone with 13th generation Intel CPUs, I’m a bit concerned. I updated the BIOS and microcode in August, though.
The error logs recorded in the event log at the time of the incident (no minidump created) include:
Hyper-V-Hypervisor 167
volmgr 162
Kernel-PnP 219
Kernel-Power 41
I understand it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what caused the problem without a minidump. What are your thoughts? Should I worry about the CPU, GPU, power supply, or should I consider it a driver/driver issue?
Hey there,
Have you reset the CMOS after the bios update? If not, I’d begin there to eliminate any chances of issues. Failing to clear CMOS might leave microcode from the old version, leading to stability problems and errors.
How long has the RMX been around?
The kernel version 41 indicates a sudden power cut. It could be that your PSU’s overprotection triggered an event.
When the screen crashes, it goes black. Does it restart on its own?
Hey there,
Have you reset the CMOS after the bios update? If not, I’d begin there to eliminate any chances of issues. Failing to clear CMOS might leave microcode from the old version, leading to stability problems and errors.
How long has the RMX been around?
The kernel version 41 indicates a sudden power cut. It could be that your PSU’s overprotection triggered an event.
When the screen crashes, it goes black. Does it restart on its own?
Run memory check using MemTest, inspect SSD via Samsung Magician, then update its firmware.
Use DISM commands in Windows for system diagnostics.
Thank you for your response.
I haven't cleared the CMOS yet, so I'll do that right away.
The RMX is about ten months old.
It didn't restart on its own—it seemed stuck in a loop, showing a black screen before returning to the desktop, only staying there for a few seconds before going black again. When it did come back, I could move the cursor, but overall it was unresponsive. I had to force shut it down using the power button.
Thank you for the reply.
I completed the memtest last night and will proceed with the remaining suggestions.
Update your bios to currency. August isn't recent enough. The fixes will prevent harming your processor.
All drivers are current at this time. The exception was the Nvidia driver, which was outdated. I used the driver from late January, not the one released a week earlier. The power cord is fine, but I purchased Corsair-sleeved cables instead. If this happens again, I'll check another outlet.