Getting Black Screen Crashes while gaming
Getting Black Screen Crashes while gaming
Over the past few weeks, I've experienced frequent crashes while playing games. My monitors go dark and the audio keeps playing until it becomes unstable, then the PC restarts itself. I've run diagnostics using DDU and examined the minidumps generated during crashes with WinDbg. The summary of my findings suggests a driver or hardware problem. Since I've already tried DDU, it seems the issue likely involves my GPU. I'm planning to reposition the GPU and see if that resolves the problem. In the meantime, I thought it would be helpful to share the bugcheck analysis I received and ask if anyone with more experience can provide additional insights. Specifications: AMD Ryzen 7 5800x, EVGA RTX 3080, ASUS ROG Strix Crosshair Hero VIII X570, Wi-Fi, 750W PSU, G.Skill TridentZ 16GB DDR4-3200, Windows 10.
Is this occurring during Black Ops 6 or with Xbox Game Pass? If yes, I’ve experienced those same issues sporadically. It doesn’t seem connected to my GPU—my temperatures stay below 60°C, and this only happens when using Game Pass games. I own an MSI mainboard with 7800x3d, 64GB DDR5, a 4TB Samsung NVMe, and a Gigabyte OC 12 4070TI. All drivers and BIOS are up to date. It might relate to the NVIDIA drivers I didn’t reinstall on the 30th before the Black Ops 6 Season 2 update, as that was the last time it occurred. Not sure.
Avoiding gamepass or blackops worked well. Temperatures looked normal. Crashes appeared in Alien: Isolation after a few minutes, Hell Let Loose didn’t reach the main menu, and Skyrim ran smoothly until I opened it in borderless 4K. Full screen 4K performed okay. Running 3D Mark Timespy caused immediate failure.
Yeah, I’m not entirely sure. My setup includes a dual monitor and I suspect it might be linked to Windows 11. After switching games to exclusive full screen, updates cause the system to hang during reboot and the motherboard reports RAM issues. It seems either my RAM is faulty or Windows 11 is involved. I also have a dedicated sound card, which suggests the problem could be software-related rather than hardware or motherboard.
I re-seated my GPU and it seemed to work for a few days then strangely out of nowhere regressed back to crashing again. Makes no sense. All I did was remove the GPU, tried to remove a little dust (there wasn't a lot), plugged it back in and everything worked great. I went from black screen to restart crashing in Alien: Isolation after not even 5 minutes of playing the game to being able to play for hours without issue. Hell Let Loose wouldn't even make it to the main menu before crashing. I booted it up and suddenly I was able to make it through an entire match without issue. I bought and started playing Kingdom Come: Deliverance since the 2nd just came out and I always wanted to play the first. Played for an hour or so without issue. I paused the game and stepped away for a while and came back a little later. The monitors had gone to sleep so I jiggled the mouse and put my headphones on. There was still sound coming through from the game. The monitors didn't seem to wake up and then after a few seconds the sound cut out in the headset and my PC restarted itself. I launched the game again and made it about 5 or 10 minutes before it black screened and restarted again. Tried to do a full shut down and start up instead of just a restart to see if that would do anything. Then the game wouldn't even make it to the main menu before crashing. I'm gonna try and do a clean install of windows tonight and see what that does. If it's still causing issues I've got a friend who offered to bring over his 2070 Super to test out. I'm at a loss though. Is there really no way to figure out if this is a software or hardware issue (as well as which piece of hardware is at fault) beyond just swapping out parts to see if one fails? Not to mention based off the previous scenario of gaming just fine for days and then regressing back to having crashing issues - makes it impossible to know if borrowing my friend's GPU for a few hours will tell me anything.
Rephrase your request clearly. I'm ready to help with your rewording.
Confirm the hardware problem. Set memory to standard settings (temporarily turn off XMP/DOCP). If feasible, check the GPU on another machine and perform stress tests such as FurMark to replicate the crash. If possible, run the GPU in a different PCIe lane and remove any overclocking present—use BIOS/software to revert factory settings. Ensure your motherboard's BIOS is up to date.
There are aspects of furmark that could make it a superior stress test compared to 3DMark. I'm planning to try moving the GPU to another PCIe slot, though I anticipate some design constraints with the internal layout. It could also restrict airflow to the fans because of the proximity to the PSU housing. At the moment, no GPU overclocking is in use. The motherboard BIOS appears current, having been updated around November 2022, which I recall when I first encountered PSU issues.
Updating this thread. I borrowed my friends 2070 Super only to realize it was too big to fit in my case. I ran MemTtest86 and everything passed just fine. I did a clean install of windows onto a new m.2 SSD that I had bought a while back but never put in. Crashing continued, but now it wasn't generating minidumps. Went into the settings to make sure everything was set up correctly to create minidumps and it was, but nothing was being created anyway. I went out and got a 1000w Corsair RMx PSU from BestBuy just to test it out and see what my PC did with an overkill PSU. Played on it last night for a few hours and no crashes. Fingers crossed that it was just the PSU again. Is it possible that my 3080 just wore out those 750w PSUs over a couple of years until they could no longer handle the transient spikes in power that the 3000 series is known for? Going to keep testing it out to see if it continues to run without crashes. I've already had that one scenario where everything ran fine for several hours of gaming giving me hope only for it to start crashing again so the cup is still in place awaiting the kick to the nuts.