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Crosshair VIII Hero 5950X black screens giving me fits

78Staff
Level 7
I am about at my wits end on these "black screens" which require hard resetting, ie having to flip power supply power off/on to be able to restart. Tried 3904 and I want to say it got even worse. Back to 3801 and still only stays up for a few days at most.

Most recent was during a file transfer to an ext USB drive, but I can't say that is always the issue. Most times, it just happens while I am not at my computer. Easily occurring one or two times a week. I sit down at my pc and it's just dead. Nothing in event view that would signify any issue...

Specs in profile, never occurred when running a 3900X, only started happening after I changed to the 5950X. Complete windows re-install was performed when the CPU was upgraded. I don't recall if this started happening right away, or in later bios' to be honest. I'm back at 3801, but may go further back if anyone can recall a revision that doesn't blackscreen?

Mem has been checked with Karhu but I'm kicking off another test now... Have also reverted to optimized defaults (usually just run DCOP) for bios to see if that makes any difference.

Honestly, the CH8 has been a disappointment overall... I am considering jumping ship. I've been an ASUS guy forever, but willing to try something else if I can find something that is stable. Don't need OC'ing, just a stable system to work with video and image media, ie Lightroom, Photoshop, DxO, Premier, etc. No games, no OC...

What about the Aorus Elites? Are they stable wtih the 5950X and 4 dimms, or are these issues persistent across the AMD platform in the 5000 CPU series?
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38 REPLIES 38

78Staff
Level 7
Have tried/tested 3 sets of memory, so not a memory issue that I can determine - black screens with all three. Event Viewer still gives no help. Not sure what to do next, going to run at optimized defaults for a few days I guess and see if it still occurs :(.

78Staff
Level 7
No responses, so assume nobody really cares, but I will update the thread anyway in case it helps someone. Have ruled out memory due to same issue occuring with 3 different sets of sticks. Have applied a slight offset to vCore voltage as discussed in the 3904 thread and here - so far no black screens for the past few days... hopefully this sorts out the issue.

78Staff wrote:
No responses, so assume nobody really cares, but I will update the thread anyway in case it helps someone. Have ruled out memory due to same issue occuring with 3 different sets of sticks. Have applied a slight offset to vCore voltage as discussed in the 3904 thread and here - so far no black screens for the past few days... hopefully this sorts out the issue.


I don't have anything helpful to add but just posting to say I'm grateful you are documenting your experience.
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station…

78Staff
Level 7
I jinxed myself it appears, Black screen is back. Not easy to troubleshoot as one has to change a setting and wait days to see if it corrected the issue.

Now trying 4001 beta, and + offsets to vcore and soc voltates... otherwise standard DCOP.

sean_s_adkins
Level 7
black screens in my opinion are coming from video card driver....dont you remember the millions of black screens those cards had when it was new? likely a new bug is all

sean.s.adkins wrote:
black screens in my opinion are coming from video card driver....dont you remember the millions of black screens those cards had when it was new? likely a new bug is all


Hmm, no actually I don't - you mean the 5700XT? I never ran across this until recently, ie the past couple months. Never with the 3950 cpu which also had the same card. I do have another card I could pull from a machine and run for a while to test - a Radeon RX 570 8GB which is also currently running fine with the aforementioned 3950 CPU now in a Asus Tuf MB.

Do you have any links to threads or other talking about black screens with the 5700XT by chance? I'll see what my google foo can find.

I actually have been wanting to replace the 5700XT, but haven't been able to find one of the newer 6800 cards of course. heck I would even look at a 1080ti or 2080 super or the like if I could find one. As I mentioned, no gaming, just content creation and adobe type stuff, encoding, etc - so I really don't need the bleeding edge for video, so it hasn't been a priority.

EDIT - well ok I found plenty of threads on the 5700XT and black screens - I never had the issue before so just wasn't aware lol. Supposed to have been fixed in drivers last year, but I'll try a few of the fix settings and see if any change - thanks.

I've been having a similar issue with my Crosshair VIII. Some days I can play on my machine for a good 4-5 hours with no issues. Other days I can't go 20 minutes without it dropping to a black screen while I'm in the middle of something (can be playing a game or just reading an email, it doesn't matter). I was running on an rather old bios version (2006 or something like that) and it just "developed" this sudden glitch. I'd been getting short dips to black every now and again but they'd recover. Now it's a constant case of turning the machine on and hoping it doesn't happen in the middle of something "important". Annoyingly it requires a hard restart (turning off the power supply) as the power or reset button cease to function when the black screen hits.

I'd initially thought it was a gpu issue due to the occasional dips. I'm still airing on the side that it is, as the issue has only gotten worse over time with no "link" to bios or other components. Issue is, I'm running a 3060ti from Gigabyte (Aorus), not a AMD card like yourself. The occurrences of the dropping to black increase initially with every driver update for the gpu, which still leads me to think it is indeed a gpu issue...

Of course I could take Gigabytes advice and just "turn it back off and on again".

78Staff
Level 7
In my (admittedly short) research, there appear to be two different occurrences - typically "active" where it drop under heavy load ie within a game, and may drop out completely, or drop out for a few seconds and them come back - and the "non-active", where it occurs with no load occurring, or coming out of sleep, etc. The active version seems to definitely be tied to gpu/gpu drivers, but according to AMD was fixed with drivers back in mid 2020 (but maybe/maybe not?).

My issue is the latter, with the black screens occurring with no/minimal load, typically overnight when it's been sitting (but not sleeping) for a period of time. No obvious repetition - it could occur after a day or two, or could be up for a week and then do it. As mentioned, Event Viewer provides no clues. For me it started only after moving from the 3900 to the 5950 cpu.

It's funny, I actually went with the 5700XT (Powercolor) over an Nvidia at the time I built the system as I figured AMD CPU/AMD GPU...should have just stuck with nVidia. Now of course it practically impossible to find anything so I am stuck with it for time being.

Common suggested fixes seem to be...
latest gpu driver
latest gpu vbios (if available - I haven't found one for the Powercolor)
custom voltages in Adenaline software
create custom resolution instead of using built in setting
PCI-E link state power management off
Enhanced Sync OFF
Manual Tuning, set Mhz slightly above stock
Power Tuning, set to any value above 0%
Probably some others, lots of threads out there.

For me, I've loaded latest Adrenaline Driver, (no VBIOS update than I can find), latest Motherboard bios 4001, with offsets set as mention in earlier posts (although, this may not be necessary since this looks to be GPU related).

Been up for two days with no issues so far since, but as mentioned it could take up to a week before the issue occurs - part of why troubleshooting this is so frustrating. If it happens again, I'll start playing with the above suggestions I suppose, or I may just swap in the RX 570 I have and run it for a week or two and see if the issue still occurs.

meanwhile, I am on the lookout for a reasonably priced used 1080TI or 2060/2070/2080, but am not holding my breath. :(.

I contacted Gigabyte and apart from a suggestion straight out of the "IT Crowd", they told me to contact my point of sale. They asked me to run through a few things with the gpu, which at first "fixed" the issue, then Nvidia dropped new drivers and it began all over again.

I will be contacting them again on Monday to see what can be done on their end as I'm still under warranty.

Is the 4001 beta bios working at all well?