I recently built my first PC, and most things have been working well, but I occasionally get a black screen during games. The audio continues normally in the background. Sometimes the display comes back by itself, while 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 initially suspected the DisplayPort 2.1 cable, so I switched the monitor to DisplayPort 1.4 to force DSC, but the blackouts still happen.
HWiNFO and Event Viewer show no WHEA errors, temperatures look normal, the drivers are current, and the PC completes OCCT stress tests without problems. What else should I try to narrow down whether this is a PCIe, firmware, graphics-card, memory, or display-link issue?
2 Answers
As a troubleshooting step, set the motherboard’s PCIe link speed manually to Gen 4 instead of Auto or Gen 5. If the black screens stop, that points toward a PCIe link-training or signal-stability issue rather than a temperature problem. Since the failures are random, use the system normally for a while before deciding whether the change helped.
Update the motherboard BIOS and the SSD firmware first, then make sure the CMOS battery is healthy. If the problem continues, test with conservative settings: remove any CPU, GPU, or memory overclock and try a mild undervolt or reduced clock speed. That can help reveal whether the issue is marginal system stability even when temperatures and stress tests look normal.
I’ll try forcing PCIe Gen 4 and monitor it for a while. The dropouts are unpredictable, so it may take some time to tell whether that actually fixes it.