On windows 7 64bit, the computer freezes and the screen turns black when I play videos fullscreen

Question

I have a weird problem on my desktop computer : it seems that playing videos in full screen (with VLC or iTunes) freezes the computer after a few minutes. Maximizing vlc does not. The weird thing is that videogames, while fullscreen, do not cause the problem.

I've upgraded the video driver (ATI Radeon HD 5xxx)

A friend suggested that it could be an overheating problem, but I run bitcoin all night without any problems.

The forums talk about a "black screen of death", but only right after login. Mine seems to be while playing videos (but it recently did it while I was playing dwarf fortress)

Answer 1

I get the same problem with a 6970, except not even in fullscreen, it happens whenever.

My temps float between 74 and 80*C and that is a safe range.

It seems that crashes trigger with flash videos when the setting "Enable hardware acceleration" is on- even in windowed mode or in a browser. With the setting off I can watch video in youtube no problem.

VLC also has a setting for experimental gpu acceleration so maybe that is checked off in your settings.

In other cases I would get hard freezes when another OpenCL call is made, whether intensive or not- even a query from say gpuz or mathematica.

I assume you are using poclbm; I suggest you just pause the miner whenever you are watching a video or doing anything else gpu intensive.

Answer 2

Bitcoin uses all available GPU power from your graphics card - when you try to run something even a little graphics intensive, you overload the GPU. Bitcoin uses up to 100% of your graphics card's available processing power and anything else you throw at it will lock it up.

If you need to run any full screen apps or games, you may have to shut down your Bitcoin app. I hope this helps and I hope you mine lots of Bitcoins.