Black Screen After/While Installing GPU Driver It all started when using CLOCKBLOCKER. I was playing RISE OF TOMB RAIDER with clockblocker enable and running. For two days I was using this sittings. But suddenly my computer crash while playing ROTTR. I did not switch on again my PC cause its already late. in the morning when I on my pc it boots as normal, then when it load the windows after the logo it goes to black screen forever. After the infinite booting I manage to go to SAFE MODE and its booting in safe mode. Reboot again and infinite black screen after windows logo. Again boot in safe mode again and uninstall the GPU driver (AMD) and reboot. After this, I managed to login my account in windows in normal mode but without the GPU driver. So I reinstalled the GPU driver, again while installing the driver the infinite black screen again. I reset the pc and login again to windows without the GPU driver, again while installing the driver it goes black again. I decided to reformat the pc, and it goes well while formatting, but when I installed the graphic (AMD) driver it goes black again. Is anyone knows the reason why? Is my AMD graphic card is damage/broken? Anyone could help me is much appreciated. Thanks in advanced for reading this.
Rise of the TombRaider is a very intensive game. (one that would hammer the card at full load constantly) -I know that this is already post issue, and you may not have been watching the temperatures at the time. However, did you happen to peek at temps while the game was running? Since you've already formatted the machine, you've already ruled out any chance of this being a "software problem". Most likely whenever the card kicks up to 3D for Aero, and whenever the drivers are installed (exiting standard VESA modes) -- the card is failing at this point. I couldn't say for certain that this is a problem with the videocard, yet it'd sure sound like your card sustained damage (just like commonly happened to people in Crysis 1). **It could equally be a power-supply issue or the connection (check those cables or check another PSU). If you have another machine to use in testing, try the card in there. This is the most sure fire way to verify if it's the board and not the supply or anything else.
I've managed to replay the PSU, and the Molex connector and the black screen persist upon while/installing a GPU driver. And also I've tested it in the other computer and still same problem of black screen. Maybe the I damaged the card.
Yep, if you've already swapped power-supplies, power-cables, and checked on another PC (with the same issue on drivers that were known to work before).. then your card probably cooked sadly. I assume that you didn't smell anything foul whenever the machine locked up on that first blackscreen in ROTTR. Still may be worth looking over the back of the board with a flashlight, specifically around the VRM area and the power plugs. Back whenever I cooked my 5870 tri-fire setup (in Crysis of course, heh), there was singe-marks on one of the card's power-leads. *Air cooling, stock coolers, minimal card spacing (I know, cringe-worthy). -The stock fan profiles on these cards let them get quite hot before thermal throttling (which is even before 100% fanspeed kicks in alot of the time). Games like ROTTR and Crysis aren't as bad as furmark persay, but they are also known to kill videocards. Judging from the card in your Guru3D profile and assuming that's your current, probably safe to say that it's not under warranty. It sucks whenever hardware dies like this, it happens though. If it's any consolation I've cooked cards as well (quite a few of them infact) with these AAA titles before I really started getting anal keeping them under 74c -- and especially before moving to liquid cooling on everything.
Probably not in this type of situation. Yet that doesn't mean you shouldn't take away something from this experience. The best thing you can do is to try to think of it as more of an educational warning on an older piece of hardware ... moreso a reminder of the importance of monitoring. Over time cards fill with dust like any other hardware, their coolers wear out, sometimes thermal paste needs to be replaced just like with a CPU or the fans go. When you have your machine restored or whenever you get a functioning card back in there, you'll want to use an OSD and keep a close eye on its health. You might also opt to run your fans at a higher speed and trade noise level for cooler-temperatures when in high tier games like these. (if you aren't already) -The bottom-line though is that monitoring gives you a forewarning of these problems (often well before the damage is done). All it takes is a day or so with cooling that's not running up to par and that can kill pretty much any hardware, CPU or GPU wise, from the accelerated heat wear. (games like ROTTR can easily take a GPU into the 90c+ range if the cooler isn't running up to par)
Yeah using Afterburner or any other similar utility (Sapphire TriXX for example.) and monitoring GPU temps can be extremely useful, you'd be surprised how quickly some games can heat up the GPU and how slow the fan profile for said GPU might be. For my own GPU to use that as a example even if the third party fan and heatsink design is pretty effective the default fan curve is to keep the fan at just a bit over 20% unless the thermal heat threshold is exceeded. (At low activity the fans are actually off.) Said heat threshold is 85 degrees Celsius and that's monitored on the GPU itself which doesn't say anything about other components that can also heat up quickly which mostly tends to be the VRM's and to compare heat between the GPU chip itself and those well when this GPU runs at a reported 80+ degrees Celsius the VRM bits are probably going to be above a 100 or even 110 degrees Celsius, even if they're built to handle it (Up to 150 C or so from what I've read.) you'd want them to be cooled down as it can affect overall lifetime of the GPU. (For HBM the VRAM is on the GPU die but for GDDR5 those are separate and can also heat up a bit, even some third party models can be a bit sloppy with cooling for these parts unfortunately.) How hot the GPU gets depends heavily on the game itself, I'm not sure how exactly this works but I assume different games have different workloads and some of these stress the GPU more heavily than others and it's not always the newest games that put the most strain on the GPU. For example Battlefield One I can set the fan speed to some 40% and it'll keep around 60 degrees whereas for one of the games that are known to really heat up the GPU it can take a lot more than that to keep temps down, Just Cause 3 for example will quickly reach 80 degrees with a fan speed of 75% in a pretty short amount of time. (60% speed for this fan and it starts getting a bit more audible, 65% and above and it gets extremely loud.) Just Cause 3 is actually the reason I started using Afterburner for setting up a manual fan curve and higher min speed since with the default well as I said the bios curve is to keep around 20% unless the threshold is exceeded and then slowly ramp up which for this game almost sent the GPU to a full 100% fan speed before it got it cooled down again for which I'm guessing the temperature must have been at 90+ Celsius at that point so now I'm keeping a better check on it. Also if you keep VSync off the main menu screen of some games can also stress the GPU when it tries to run at 1000+ frames per second, generally it's more coil whine at that point than overall heat but that will also build up if you leave the game running for a while, think Starcraft 2 was known to cause this leading to Blizzard setting a default framerate cap for both in-game and when alt-tabbed out when in windowed or borderless mode. Not too sure how the fan and cooling efficiency is for the 7700 series, 290X was built to keep around a 95 Celsius activity for the stock model (Bit high. ) but the earlier models (Even the high-end 7900 models.) probably had a target of 75 or 80 degrees but I'll have to look that up and I guess it's similar where the default behavior was to keep noise level as the more important above fan speed and cooling so a overall low fan activity unless the heat threshold is reached but if the game is already stressing out the GPU fully it might not be able to cool it down quick enough. (There's the thermal threshold and then above that there's a more critical level where the GPU starts or at least should start clocking down and really throttle to cool down - 100 - 105 I think. - and above that you get a driver crash as the GPU simply shuts down to prevent damage - at 115 - 120 Celsius perhaps, probably a bit lower actually. - but this doesn't always work depending on how hot both the GPU die itself was and then also the VRM and VRAM which usually isn't monitored so if it's hot enough on the GPU core for the card to shut down those might be at even more critical levels and sustain hardware damage.) At least for the non-Fury GPU models you can set the actual fan speed via AMD's driver control panel instead of just the threshold value, kinda dislike that as Afterburner shows it is possible to adjust the fan itself but I doubt AMD is changing that any time soon. (Unsure how it is for the 400 series, guessing Wattman might have some more settings available and hopefully that includes fan related ones too, having to use a third party utility for optimal GPU cooling and full functionality over e.g fan speed shouldn't really be required in my opinion.) (Could of course also flash the bios itself with a higher fan curve or some other edits but that's a bit more advanced still.) EDIT: And yeah I've burned a few GPU's too, first one was a 4970X2 so I'm not going to be using a dual-chip GPU any time soon heh. (And the second and thankfully last was a 6970 where the fan failed and I didn't notice it in time so it became highly unstable on anything above 2d clock speeds, crap happens.)
Maybe its time for me to buy new card. Maybe next year. Hmmm time to save some coin for my new GPU for this gaming habit of mine. Thanks all for great educational trivia about monitoring GPU temp. thanks..
