The Monitor stops working and fails to start.
The Monitor stops working and fails to start.
Hello, everyone, I hope you're all well after the new year. A friend of mine has been experiencing an issue with his PC over the past two weeks. Usually, we want to play a game of R6S, but after just a few rounds (often only one), his monitor freezes and shows the last in-game frame. ATP mentions he no longer hears the game, as if it crashed, even though he can still hear and talk through Discord voice chat. Once the monitor becomes stuck, he can't do anything—his keyboard and mouse are unresponsive. He either tries to restart or presses the power off button to turn the PC back on. Now, his monitor shows no output at all; it doesn’t recognize any signal, and the screen goes to sleep. This keeps happening even after several reboots. He also attempts to adjust the HDMI or GPU ports, saying that only by removing the PSU plug from the PC and waiting 15 minutes before reconnecting does the output return. We tried removing the GPU driver in Safe Mode using Display Driver Uninstaller, then reinstalling the latest NVIDIA driver. After this, he managed to play R6S for five hours without any issues. However, after restarting his PC, the problem reappeared and didn’t resolve. We also tried installing older versions of the NVIDIA drivers (566.36, 566.14, 565.90), but the issue persisted.
What I’m thinking is: his monitor freezes whether he plays against bots, normal players, or alone. It shouldn’t be a CPU problem. The monitor still shows it going into sleep mode, even though it doesn’t recognize PC output signals. This suggests a potential GPU software issue, possibly due to the single successful run after fresh driver installation.
I’m completely open to suggestions. I have no idea how to fix this. If you need any information, reports, or anything else, I’ll be glad to provide it. I might receive all replies the same day and wait a couple of hours before responding, but I could take up to a few days if I need to consult my friend about it.
Thanks to everyone who tries to help.
His system details:
- Motherboard: mbo: msi z390 gaming plus
- CPU: i5-9400f
- GPU: asus tuf gtx 1660 super 6GB GDDR6
- RAM: 16GB KHX3200C16D4/8GX
Hi, thanks for the update. The PSU is a Thermaltake Smart SE 730W. CPU temperatures stay near 40°C in-game and GPU around 50°C. Both utilization remains at 100%. The monitor is an MSI Optix MAG272C. I'm currently testing R6S with DirectX 11 (the default is DirectX 12), and it seems to be functioning well—especially after the first fresh driver install, which took a long time to complete.
Another update: after attempting to use dx11, we managed to play for a couple of hours without any issues. Everything worked smoothly. Today, following what seems like a system restart, the issue reappeared—monitor freezes occurred after a few rounds.
We found a workaround for the monitor not displaying output after freezing: once the monitor freezes, remove the HDMI cable from the PC, wait a couple of seconds, power on/restart it, wait long enough to boot into Windows login, then reinsert the HDMI cable. The monitor will show output without waiting over 15 minutes. However, if the PC is started without removing the HDMI cable, you’ll need to remove the PSU plug first before it works.
Hoping someone can help explain this unusual problem.