My PC has recently started losing video output during games. Both monitors go black, but the game audio and voice chat continue, and the GPU fans ramp up. It has happened in Helldivers 2, Wardogs, and Lightyear Frontier. HWiNFO shows the GPU hotspot reaching about 81.7°C, below the reported 83°C limit, and it has not reported CPU throttling. Replacing my roughly nine-year-old power supply with a Thermaltake 850W unit did not solve the problem. The system uses an RTX 3060 Ti, Ryzen 5 7600X, ASRock B650 PG Lightning motherboard, and 96GB of G.Skill RAM. Both a DisplayPort monitor and an HDMI monitor lose signal at the same time, so a single cable or display seems unlikely to be the cause. What should I test next, and is this more likely to be a driver, GPU, power, or cooling issue?
2 Answers
Since both displays fail while audio continues, this sounds more like the graphics driver or GPU becoming unresponsive than a bad monitor cable. Try clearing the NVIDIA shader cache and doing a clean driver installation. If the problem began after a driver update, testing an older known-stable driver version may also help. It would be useful to reproduce the crash with a controlled GPU stress test while logging GPU temperature, hotspot temperature, power, clocks, and voltage.
A cable swap is still easy to test, but losing both HDMI and DisplayPort outputs at once makes one bad cable less likely. Run a GPU test such as FurMark, and also try a CPU or combined system test to separate GPU instability from broader system problems. If only the GPU test causes the black screen, try reducing the GPU power limit or core clock temporarily. If that makes the crashes stop, the card may be aging or unstable under load.
Both monitors go blank simultaneously, and one is connected over DisplayPort while the other uses HDMI. I have not tried FurMark yet, but I plan to run it while watching the HWiNFO logs. The monitoring software has not shown any CPU throttling so far.