Freezing on the primary display followed by a black screen?
Freezing on the primary display followed by a black screen?
Hey there!
I’ve been using my PC for about a year and a half now, and everything has been working perfectly until recently. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve noticed some odd behavior. Periodically, my main monitor freezes. It usually occurs when I switch tabs, but I haven’t managed to get it to freeze consistently. When the main display goes black, the other two still display sound. If I tap or switch to another monitor, that one also freezes. After a few seconds, all three screens turn off and no audio plays. About two seconds later, everything resumes normally.
This only happens occasionally—sometimes once or twice during a typical gaming or streaming session, usually lasting 4–8 hours on Saturday and around 6 hours in the week. There’s no clear pattern regarding the game I’m playing, how many tabs are open, or which apps are running. I checked HWMonitor right after it happens, but everything seems fine—though it’s possible the readings refresh too fast to notice anything unusual.
My initial guess was that it might be related to GPU drivers, especially since it’s a recent problem. I performed a complete uninstall and reinstalled the latest graphics drivers, but the issue reappeared today.
I don’t believe it’s a hardware problem because all components are new and I built the system over a year and a half ago without any issues until two weeks back. Here’s a quick rundown of the specs:
- GPU: 7800xt 16GB XFX Speedster
- CPU: Ryzen 7 9700X 3.8GHz 8-core
- RAM: G.Skill Flare x5 DDR5 6000
- Motherboard: MOBO Gigabyte B650M X AX
- Power Supply: Corsair RM850e 850W+Gold
- Cooler: ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III 360
- Storage: Samsung 990 Pro 1TB M.2 (300GB free)
- Storage: WDB SN580 2TB M.2 (838GB free)
- Operating System: Windows 11 Pro
Thanks in advance for any advice—keep up the good work!
Update your post with complete hardware details and operating system specifics. Provide the power supply information including make, model, wattage, age, and condition (original, build, refurbished, used). List all connected peripherals. Specify whether the network connection is wired or wireless. Include any error codes, warnings, or events recorded by Reliability History/Monitor or Event Viewer.
What are the screens? The initial idea was perhaps related to an unusual behavior in DSC when it's activated.
I own a pair of Acer Predator XB273U 27" 2K WQHD monitors with 2560 x 1440 resolution and 180Hz refresh rate, along with my third one which is an Asus VG248QE.
What I found suggests these displays only support DP 1.2 and HDMI 2.0 ports, which would imply they can't achieve 180Hz (that's quite unusual). How are they connected? From what I understand, they should reach about 150Hz over DP and 144Hz over HDMI. Also, make sure HDR isn't turned on in Windows. This one seems to work fine.
my HDR is active too... probably I need to disable it first. it's been running for a while, but if fixing this would help or not, I'll try it.
To achieve 180Hz they use chroma subsampling, which might cause problems. Consider lowering the refresh rate to 144Hz if it doesn't resolve the issue.
Seems like the last couple of days have been smooth. Just updated the HDR, that's all I made. Thanks for the help!