blackscreen and entire pc freezes

[Metalrocks]

i have a r9 290x from asus and got it for less than 4 months plus the latest drivers installed. so far so good, it runs solid but every now and then the screen has a quick flicker, is normal for some time, then suddenly the entire screen turns black and the computer freezes on top of it that i have to force restart my pc. it happens maybe after 10 min of use or after an hour or more.
i seem to have it mainly when im in win and surfing the net. had it only once when playing a game. otherwise never wile playing for several hours.

any ideas what could cause this weird issue? im afraid that i will have the same crap i had 4 months ago that my GPU died on me and had to reconfigure my HDD and lost everything on it.

 

[aprildog18]

It's strange that your GPU died and had to reconfigure your HDD. Generally, one problem in a hardware doesn't cause a problem somewhere else too (unless bad voltage).

What you describe sounds like a RAM problem, except you haven't said anything about sound looping, which should occur =\. Anwho, I would first try to find out how your RAM sticks are doing by doing windows+R, and running "mdsched.exe" without the quotes. It shouldn't take more than 10 minutes to run if you have < 8GB.

If no problems crop up, I don't know what the problem could be. But I would try checking the hard drive. You can check how your hard drive is doing with a SMART scan (I use http://www.almico.com/sfdownload.php run it, start i t up, go to the SMART tab, select your hard disk in the drop down, perform a short test). If the raw value of current pending sector count and uncorrectable sector count is greater than 0, your hard drive doesn't have a long time to live.

 

[Metalrocks]

silly me. i have win 7 64 bit and 8gb ram.

it was weird to me as well why things had to be reset but my older GPU was a 7870 and suddenly wile gameing, the enter screen turned colourish and could not even start up win anymore. already during the start up the screen was already having weird colour schemes.
the shop told me that the GPU is busted and that win has to be newly installed to make sure things work fine.

gave your link a try.
so these 2 specs you have mentioned; the value is 200. but they do have a green "OK". so does it mean i should consider getting a new HDD anyway?

 

[aprildog18]

silly me. i have win 7 64 bit and 8gb ram.

it was weird to me as well why things had to be reset but my older GPU was a 7870 and suddenly wile gameing, the enter screen turned colourish and could not even start up win anymore. already during the start up the screen was already having weird colour schemes.
the shop told me that the GPU is busted and that win has to be newly installed to make sure things work fine.

gave your link a try.
so these 2 specs you have mentioned; the value is 200. but they do have a green "OK". so does it mean i should consider getting a new HDD anyway?

Ok. If you couldn't get past the boot, that's just the mobo saying that it won't startup because it can't find the graphics card (it should still boot if you have integrated chip in CPU/intel).

Sorry, I meant the raw number, not the value, so I think a value of 200 means Good. I would still do a ram check first since that is what is causing it.

 

[Metalrocks]

ok, i have checked again and the "raw" are all 0. well, like 8 zeros for both.
also performed a RAM check and no problems found.

could it be a driver problem? i did install the latest available for it but never use beta drivers.

 

[aprildog18]

I don't know anymore. I was pretty certain it would be a problem with RAM. It could be driver problems but I don't think so? You can try installing a previous version, but yeah, I don't think I can help you out anymore because I don't know what else could be causing it.

 

[Laughing Man]

It's not your RAM, drivers or any other part of your computer the issue is specific to the card.

290x Black screen is a well known issue with the cards and seems to be related to brand of memory (one of two types seems to be more affected than others) and specifically is related to memory voltage levels while sitting in 2D low power mode.

The general idea is that the every now and then the card will do a small bump from 2D mode to 3D mode, the result being that the Vcore will go from low power consumption to high power consumption. In theory the memory voltage should jump in line with the needed increase in power but it doesn't. the result the memory doesn't have enough voltage to meet the demands and the card drops in to sleep mode (black screen mode) and fails to restore until a restart is performed.

The solution is to bump the 2D memory voltage levels by +25mv or decrease the memory speed by a fraction. Using either the catalyst control centre or some other similar card monitoring overclocking software. This seems to resolve the issue for a number of affected folks.

 

[Metalrocks]

It's not your RAM, drivers or any other part of your computer the issue is specific to the card.

290x Black screen is a well known issue with the cards and seems to be related to brand of memory (one of two types seems to be more affected than others) and specifically is related to memory voltage levels while sitting in 2D low power mode.

The general idea is that the every now and then the card will do a small bump from 2D mode to 3D mode, the result being that the Vcore will go from low power consumption to high power consumption. In theory the memory voltage should jump in line with the needed increase in power but it doesn't. the result the memory doesn't have enough voltage to meet the demands and the card drops in to sleep mode (black screen mode) and fails to restore until a restart is performed.

The solution is to bump the 2D memory voltage levels by +25mv or decrease the memory speed by a fraction. Using either the catalyst control centre or some other similar card monitoring overclocking software. This seems to resolve the issue for a number of affected folks.

i see. thanks for this explanation.

im not so good with this kind of stuff, so can you explain to me how i do it with the catalyst control centre? i did look under the performance and video category but didnt see anything with 2D memory voltage.