And then the screen goes black....

scamander said:

Hi all,

Getting the nark to to random crashes to a black screen. It happens when I'm playing games on the PC.

I recently put in a new video card (Radeon 5700HD) and installed all the new drivers. Recently I had a message in the action centre saying I needed to install a driver (which was odd as I've done this). I went to the website and downloaded the new drivers and Catalyst software kit.

Any ideas - I have googled this and overheating is often mentioned - how can I check if this is the case?

Anyway - help appreciated (as always).

Hi scamander :)

Black screen in many cases points to faulty hardware.

But lets check first.

So follow these steps in this order,

First when in idle take a look on catalyst and post here your graphic card temperature.

Then,

Download and install driver sweeper from Phyxion.net - Driver Sweeper

Download the most recent software/driver for your ati from AMD Graphics Drivers & Software

Unistall ati software/driver,restart in safe mode ,run driver sweeper and clean any ati remaining fragments,restart in normal mode.

Install the new ati software/driver.

Update DirectX.

Again in idle post here your graphic card temperature.

Run Video Card - Stress Test with Furmark

Run RAM - Test with Memtest86+

--------------------------
Finish with the above steps and post back with any results.

scamander said:

thanks for that - how do I find my video card core temp?

Right click on desktop,click on catalyst control center\performance\graphic overdrive.

scamander said:

cheers for all of that my card temp was 37 degrees. I removed all ATI drivers and did as you said. The Burn-In test went on for a while and the temp levelled out so I quit but there were no probs. Couldn't do the memory test though as I don't have a USB stick to hand!

I remember installing new drivers without removing old ones so perhaps that's what was causing the issues. Fingers crossed and thanks again.

Your welcome!

My pleasure to help :)

-------------------------------
37 degrees? Good!

You can run memtest from cd image,read carefully all the tutorial.

But i guess we can wait a little first :)

So work,play as usual and please post back with ANY results.

scamander said:

Hi Panais,

Darn...was playing Football Manager and it did it again. The screen isn't entirely black, there are very narrow vertical stripes (if that's important). Getting narked as I got a new video card and PSU and hoped it'd go smoothly. I should add that this is a recent event - have had the card for a good few months with no issues until now.

Please run memtest from cd image,read carefully all the tutorial.

RAM - Test with Memtest86+

Live it to run overnight if possible.

scamander said:

Cheers Panais,

I've tried burning the files to two separate cds and then booting. All I get is a short time in which a flashing character space (the small underline you get in the space you are going to write) appears and then the pc boots as normal. I've gone into BIOS and selected the boot from CD/DVD option as well.

Any other memory tests I can use???

Did you tried?

Bios\boot device priority\1st boot device cdrom

During startup you may need to ""press any key to boot from cd""