Screen goes black in the middle of gaming.

Agent Jen · 28 Oct 2012

I've got the same problem I've read about in other threads here about the screen going black during games., but in my case it's rather wierd. My screen goes black no matter what game I am playing. Can be an old game like Condition Zero or Left4dead2. screen goes black but there is still sound, then the monitor shuts off unable to find a signal.

I have two computers with pretty much the same specs- pentium core duo 2.8 ghz, 3 gigs ram, both have Nvidea geforce 9500gt and one has XP and the other windows 7. One is an emachine and the other a Dell.

The thing that is wierd is that both PC's run games perfectly with the same gpu's in both, Nvidea 9500gt, but one gpu developed a bad fan after awhile. and so I took that 9500gt out of that one and took the other 9500gt with the good fan out of the other PC and installed it in the computer with a bigger HD. Now when playing any game it can play perfectly for a few minutes to an hour then the screen goes black and there is nothing you can do about it. ctrl\alt\dlt won't bring the screen back on to get to the task manager, and the monitor shuts off and I must do a hard shutdown at the power button and restart.

I reinstalled both the drivers that came with the gpu and updated drivers from Nvidea's website. neither works and the problem still exists. If I install the gpu with the bad fan back in the computer having the issue, the problem is resolved and if I install the cpu that I switched out back where it was originally in the original pc it works in that one as well, so placing the two gpu's back in the original pc's they were in works, so this means it's not the operating system causing the issue. it's not corrupted drivers either, not a mother board issue, or an issue with the cpu or for that matter registry issues or anything else I can think of. It's just plain weird. Makes no sense. Anyone have any idea what the hell could be going on?

archer · 29 Oct 2012

Hello Agent Jen, Welcome to Sevenforums. I see that you have 3 gigs of memory. Do you have 2 RAM sticks for this? If yes, then try to run the PC with a single stick and tell us the outcome.

Agent Jen · 29 Oct 2012

Thank you for the reply. I will try the suggestion to remove one stick, Both computers have 2 sticks of ram. However not quite sure where this could be going because as I mentioned both computers have pretty similar specs. Everything works perfectly with all games and functions on both computers so long as both 9500gt gpu's remain in the PC I originally intalled them in. I forgot to mention that the gpu has a bad fan still works perfectly, It's just a bearing and it's noisy, fan still runs perfectly. Diagnostics concluded that both GPU's are not overheating, niether are either CPU's in their perspective computers. Anyway If I switch the GPU's out (a second duplicate GPU as the one I just took out) I then begin to have these issues. Again if I switch the GPU's back to their perspective original computers everything works perfectly fine. Not sure how any of this is explained by an issue with ram if both gpu's create an enviroment where everything works perfectly fine and no black screen once the gpu's are put back in their perspective original computers. The reason I switched the gpu's is because the computer that originally had the gpu with the noisy fan contains virutal music software for professional recording which I have been doing for the past 17 years, and the noisy fan can be heard in playbacks of recorded tracks. if you pile on a lot of multiple tracks the fan can be a major issue so I switched the GPU's out.