I recently built my first PC, and it has been mostly stable except for occasional black screens during different games. The audio continues, and sometimes the display returns by itself. Other times I have to press Ctrl+Shift+Win+B to restart the graphics driver. The system uses a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, an RTX 5070 Ti, and a PG27UCDM monitor. I suspected the DisplayPort 2.1 cable, but switching to DisplayPort 1.4 with DSC enabled did not resolve it. HWiNFO and Event Viewer show no WHEA errors, temperatures look normal, drivers are current, and the PC completes OCCT stress tests without problems. What should I try next to isolate the cause?
2 Answers
Update the motherboard BIOS and SSD firmware first, then consider replacing the CMOS battery if the board is new but has been sitting in storage. If the problem continues, test with conservative settings: disable CPU, GPU, and memory overclocks or EXPO, and try a mild CPU or GPU undervolt only after confirming everything is stable at stock settings. It may also help to test another DisplayPort cable or temporarily use a lower refresh rate to separate a display-link problem from a PCIe or hardware-stability issue.
Try forcing the motherboard's PCIe slot to Gen 4 instead of Auto or Gen 5. Some newer platforms can have intermittent link or signaling issues that only show up during real gaming workloads. Use the system normally for a while afterward, since the dropouts may not happen immediately.
I’ll try that. Since the blackouts are unpredictable, I’ll need some time to see whether changing the PCIe generation makes a difference.