Screen turns black following Nvidia driver installation.
Screen turns black following Nvidia driver installation.
I worked on the PC I made for my cousin's son as a Christmas gift. It had a B550 motherboard, 5700X processor, 16GB RAM, and an RTX 4060 graphics card, running Windows 10. Yesterday he told me his computer wouldn't show anything after trying to update to "Windows 5," but I think he was actually aiming for Windows 11. He was eager and tried to force shut it down during installation, which didn’t help. After that, the Windows setup failed completely. I reinstalled Windows 10 thinking it would fix the problem. But once I started updating, the GPU driver would flash black and stay there, preventing a display. The PC wouldn’t freeze, but the number pad and caps lock lights would blink on and off. If I forced it off, it would boot into Windows again, then crash back to a black screen with no USB devices detected. I had to repeat this until a startup repair was done, after which everything restarted. I reinstalled the OS again and got the same issue. I checked the GPU power connection, reset it, disabled advanced decoding, changed the bar size, tried using the latest driver from Nvidia, and even used an older driver—still no improvement. Is this GPU faulty? I’m considering swapping it out for a new one to see if it makes a difference, but I’ll share more ideas here.
Have you checked if updating the BIOS on your motherboard improves performance?
Checking ASRock's website suggests they've released just one BIOS update since their current version, which means I'm not very optimistic but I'll give it a try.
I've updated the BIOS to the newest release, but it actually made things worse—it no longer supports the 4060 model. I replaced it with a 1050Ti, which worked and got me into Windows. The graphics driver installed correctly, and after a quick flash it went from black to normal display. It's not looking great yet, but once everything is updated in Windows I'll try reinstalling the 4060 to see how it performs. I'm also considering adding a 1660Ti to test if a GPU that needs extra power is functioning properly, rather than checking the PSU.
It seems the 4060 is likely the issue now. The 1660ti also performed well, but it didn’t boot on another machine either. I’m not sure why this GPU failed so quickly—just started using it a month ago.