So I have a dual-monitor setup and every once in awhile (pretty random amounts of time), both of my monitors will go black. I can't fully characterize this at the moment because I haven't used my desktop in awhile so it hasn't happened for some time and now that I'm back at it, I forgot to pay attention. If I remember correctly, all sound and other functions are still operating correctly while the screen goes black. I have an RGB keyboard and mouse and both still cycle through colors. I used to try and hit a whole bunch of keys on my keyboard and nothing would work. I also, powered my monitors off and back on again and fully unplugged them from the computer. Just today, it happened again and I just happened to hit the Windows key because I was trying to do a restart using hotkeys since I couldn't see the screen and the screens both instantly returned. I am under the assumption that this is a video card issue since it's the screens going out but I'm not really sure. Please let me know if you have any ideas of possibilities causing this or troubleshooting steps.
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is your video card particularly underspecced or quite old? do you have any idea what temp its running at?– Frank ThomasMay 14, 2016 at 21:16
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My video card is a Gigabyte Windforce GTX 960 4GB card so a pretty decent card. It is currently running at 33 degrees Celsius and I haven't seen it go above 40 so it doesn't really run that hot either. I have a full tower case with as many fans installed as I can so that I don't have to worry about cooling issues– DrewMay 17, 2016 at 1:41
1 Answer
Sounds like your video card isn't getting enough signal in order to render the screen. I would try a lower resolution to see if that helps. You also should make sure you are on 60Hz. Sometimes when adding a monitor my computer would go to 59Hz instead. This might affect the screen rendering. Try plugging in a different monitor to it. Something else to consider might be to go to one monitor. I know with my laptop if I do 2 monitors with one laptop, this affected the rendering of the flatscreen I had. Once I went down to just the flatscreen, and not the laptop monitor the system would render the one screen fine. Just some ideas.