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hardlock + black screen

K

killernerd

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 8, 2012
Messages
215
i have 2 7970's in cf and i'm using 2 22" monitors both running at 1680x1050.

While playing a game my pc will randomly crash. No errors, nothing.
It just switches to a black screen and after a couple of seconds both my monitors go in standby (no input signal).

It's a complete hardlock and the only way around it is to force restart.

Running 13.5 beta2 and haven't had any issues untill 2 or so days ago.

I'll try reverting back to 13.4, in the meantime does anyone else have these kinds of issues?
 
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The issue its only while gaming?.. You tryed just stressing with a program to discard driver issue or PSU issue?... If the cards stop working during stress test is more like a PSU issue than driver...
 
i'd find that odd. it's a 1050w corsair psu just over a year old now but i'll check the voltages in the bios when i reboot.

But if it would be the psu then why is it so random? You'd expect it to be easily reproducable but it isn't.
I've had it happen 3 times in the past 7 days :\
 
not really.

Mine just goes pitch black (like when you shut down your machine) and the monitors go in standby.
The fans spin up (even though the temps are fine)
and the entire system just hardlocks.
 
killernerd said:
not really.

Mine just goes pitch black (like when you shut down your machine) and the monitors go in standby.
The fans spin up (even though the temps are fine)
and the entire system just hardlocks.
Click to expand...

Static problem with the PSU, electric protector or UPS.... that happens to me few times on a friend house.. where the ground on the power outlets was bad.. my cards start to spin at max and then shut down.. and noticed that when the PC was on and touch the cards or PSU it gave me some soft electrical shocks.. i took a multimeter and check their power outlets on the room, and then i realized the ground was disconnected...
 
well, i checked the power outlet here a couple of weeks back and as far as i can tell the grounding pin is connected.

edit: It always seems to happen when i'm busy on my second monitor (doing stuff in chrome mostly) while there's still a game running on my primary. I run most of my games in borderless windowed so i can freely move between my 2 monitors whenever i want and that seems to trigger it.

edit 2: i've been running the unigine benchmark at ultra settings for over 30 minutes now and i haven't crashed. While playing guildwars 2 my pc crashed after not even 10 minutes and that game barely makes the fans spin up.
The only peculiarity i've noticed is that when switching from full screen to windowed (in the unigine benchmark) it also disables crossfire.

opinions?
 
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might it have something to do with youtube? Since youtube asks for 2d clocks while the game requires full speed?

Perhaps that somehow clashes with each other resulting in a crash?
 
done that, see if that helps.

Also if anyone is using chrome and can't find the haredware acceleration option for flash: this is intended.
Chrome will use the gpu regardless of the hardware acceleration setting used by flash.

In stead go to: chrome://flags/ (paste that url in your nav bar) and disable the "GPU compositing on all pages" entirely

In any case, i'll report back if this helped.
 
the good news is that it helped with the youtube crashes (so far)

the bad news is that my pc now hardlocked while dragging my mpc window accross the 2 monitors (wanting to drag it from my secondary to my main).

I could disabled hardware acceleartion all together for windows but i'd rather not. more suggestions?
 
update:

I tried disabling ULPS and rebooting but that didn't work. I launched GW2 and played for about 10 minutes then i tried to go from gw to my mail client (on my secondary monitor) and it instantly froze and gave me that black screen hard lock.

I also can't disable hardware acceleration through my window's settings (CCC doesn't allow changing those settings).

So i'm kinda at a loss here. This dual monitor setup has worked flawlessly for months and now suddenly it starts crashing...

edit: i checked the voltages in the bios, they're all ok. Temps are fine too.
 
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cmon people i really need help here.

the issue:
randomly my monitors will go black (and into stand by because they lost their input signal), the fans spin up and the computer will hard lock. The only thing i can do is press the power button untill the machine shuts down.

when it has happened so far:

1. while playing a game and youtube is running in the background (not sure if it has anything to do with it)
2. while playing a game and i select something from my chrome browser on my secondary monitor
3. while dragging a media player window from my secondary monitor to my primary

how does it happen:
1. "fps" will drop, even in windows the pc will "stutter" for a bit before going to black screen and hard locking OR
2. it simply goes black and hard locks without any indication

things i have tried:
1. disable hardware acceleration for chrome
2. disable ulps in regedit
3. switch back from 13.5b2 drivers to 13.4
4. someone suggested it might be the grounding but i've lived here for 5 years now and it only started a week ago so i don't think it's that.
5. i can't disable hardware acceleration for windows itself (CCC doesn't allow this)
6. voltages and temps are OK.

edit:
my system specs:
2 club 3d 7970's in crossfire
rampage IV extreme motherboard
1050w corsair psu.

edit 2:

this issue feels alot like one i had months earlier where the display driver would crash and recover giving me the message "AMD Display Driver has stopped responding and has recovered" but this time it doesn't seem like it's recovering.
 
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I've had hard lock oddities associated with a PSU on it's way out. Got a spare you could test on?
 
hmmm, not really. But if it is the psu then shouldn't this be very easy to reproduce?
As it is now it happens completely randomly and rarely more than once a day.

there also no oddities what so ever in the gpu-z logs. the 12v rail droops a bit from 12.22 to 12.19 or even 12.16 when under heavy load but that's still well within what should be considered as normal, no?
i'm going to keep logging untill i crash again, see if something strange shows up on the logs even though i doubt that

edit: besides, i ran the unigine benchmark for 30+ minutes without issues while my pc sometimes crashes after barely a couple of minutes of guildwars 2 which doesn't even use cf
 
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I had a customers PC that ran everything perfectly fine, except for FF14. It would hard lock randomly from as little as 1 minute to as long as 3 hours. It would eventually lock every time though. After we RMA'd the video card, ram and mobo, I said fuck it and bench tested the whole system apart with another PSU. It worked flawlessly. Exact same PSU model (Corsair CX600), it just didn't like that one particular load pattern. One of the weirdest issues I've seen to date, so I figured I'd throw it out there.
Hell, I use that PSU in my bench PC now without issue.
 
hmmm, interesting. If i dismantle my old pc (wich is my brother's current pc) i should be able to use my old 850w psu for testing purposes.

I'll try it one of the following days and i'll let you know. Other suggestions obviously remain welcome in the meantime :)
 
just as fast as they appeared they have no disappeared.
No crashes since my last post...

No clue what caused them to happen nor what fixed it o_O
 
my 7950 had this issue for awhile. It stopped after I flashed a new bios to the card and bumped the power limit % to +20.
 
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