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My pc has been having regular freezes and black screens the past few weeks, especially during 'graphically-intensive' processes.

When: At first it was only during video games, then also during Zoom calls - especially when also using my webcam. Now it also sometimes does it kinda randomly when I've only got a few Chrome tabs open.

How often: Sometimes my pc works fine for a 'session', other time's it'll lag for a whole day, other times it'll lag in the morning, then be fine in the evening. In other words: it's pretty random.

What:

  • Low framerates in games sometimes.
  • Short black screen on all screens (got 2 monitors attached) - sound often continues playing
  • Screen stuttering and freezing (often combined with a black screen)
  • In games, it'll just continuously have low framerates. In other applications (e.g. Zoom) it might show a black screen, then be fine for 10min, then another black screen, etc.

Just now was the first time my pc completely froze after(or rather, during) a black screen. I had to manually shut it down via a long press on the power button.

I assume it's most likely a GPU or PSU problem. I've downloaded GPU-Z to check the power draw, to see if anything out of the ordinary might be visible when an issue occurs, but I could find nothing noteworthy.

Pc specs: It's an Alienware Aurora R7 (yeah yeah.. kinda regretting that rn but I got a really good deal on it) GTX 1080 founders edition (single 8-pin connector) i7-8700K (not overclocked atm) PSU: DELL hardware 850W Motherboard: Z370 line (also some DELL proprietary hardware) More detailed: https://pastebin.com/S1eanGrk

Reading this, would it be more likely for it to be a GPU or PSU issue? (or something else?) And could you give me any tips on how to diagnose it? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers,

Chris

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  • the temperature of u'r components are fine when these problems occur?
    – DarkBeccio
    Commented Jan 17, 2021 at 16:59

1 Answer 1

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I always look to drivers for an easy fix. Just uninstall your GPU drivers first as it sounds to be when you use something that uses acceleration (like zoom). If you don't know how to do this there are plenty of YouTube videos on how to do it.

I would highly doubt your power supply would have anything to do with this as if it drew too much it would just shut down to prevent over-drawing, and potentially damaging something.

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