Black Screen of Death

[Triggered Fridgekin]

Hey fellas!

Over the past couple of weeks, my computer has been taking on the habit of starting up and greeting me with a black screen. No POST screen, cannot navigate to safe mode, and BIOS does not appear when hitting the appropriate keys. I do not have a PS/2 keyboard.

However, the rest of the computer is working fine. I can tell when it loads in to Windows because I can hear the disk drive spins up and all my peripherals light up/work.

That being said, it's only a temporary downtime as when my screen feels like returning, it is displaying the desktop and any corresponding things I may open as I right-click and hit the Windows button to try and kick it in to showing something.

Here's what I have done:

• Swapped the DVI-to-VGA converter
• Powercycle my monitor and PC
• Reseated the video card
• Sat the video card in the second PCI-E lane
• Tried another 6-pin 12v rail but since they are connected in series it didn't matter
• Ran the VGA cable to this laptop and still provided me with the blank screen
• Did a general cleaning out of dust/debris
• Changed the powersaver settings to max performance
• Ran an alternate 12v rail from a molex-to-6pin for the video card

I should also point out that, unlike many black screens of death, this does not come after a crash. Once I regain control of the PC, I can put any kind of load on it and it won't crash until I turn it off for the night and try to turn it on the next day

Whether or not this is a case of correlation and causation but the issues only began once I installed the 14.7 AMD drivers which had the Wildstar optimization. When it first started, I uninstalled the drivers, ran the latest ATIman for removal, and did a fresh reinstall.

Thoughts? I'm pretty much at the mercy of hoping it boots up but today it seems to be taking extra long and don't have spare parts to isolate the issue between the PSU, GPU, and board.

[IRunSoFarAway]

Whether or not this is a case of correlation and causation but the issues only began once I installed the 14.7 AMD drivers which had the Wildstar optimization. When it first started, I uninstalled the drivers, ran the latest ATIman for removal, and did a fresh reinstall.

Sounds to me like the issue is right there. Have you tried reverting to a previous release to see if the issue persists?

Try http://www.wagnardmobile.com/DDU/ and https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner after uninstalling to make sure any old files/registry entries are gone.

Edit: You didn't post your system specs, but when I look at the page, I see that 14.4 is the latest release, and 14.7 is still a beta driver, so...going back to 14.4 will probably fix it. You can try and reinstall 14.7 with the above programs just to see if anything changes, but if it doesn't, try 14.4.