PCIe 4.0 - What generation should I pick in my bios to turn off PCIe 4.0? 5700XT Black Screen Fix

Question

I have a AMD RX 5700XT GPU paired with a Ryzen 2700x CPU, and have been having a ton black screen crashing while gaming. My computer stays on, sound stays on, but both my screens turn black. There's no way out of it other than a hard reboot...

One of the suggested solutions to this problem is to turn off PCIe 4.0 via the BIOS.

I have an X570 Aorus Elite Motherboard which supports PCIe 4.0. To turn it off, do I choose "Gen 3"? Mine is current set to "Auto".

This screenshot is a little different than my options, I only have:

1. Auto
2. Gen 1
3. Gen 2
4. Gen 3

My guess to why I'm missing Gen 3 is because I'm using a AMD Ryzen 2700x. It could be that Ryzen 2*** series CPU's don't support Gen 4?

My BIOS is updated to the most recent revision F12f.

My motherboard manual says:

PCIe Slot Configuration

Allows you to set the operation mode of the PCI Express slots to Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3, or Gen 4. Actual operation mode is subject to the hardware specification of each slot. Auto lets the BIOS automatically configure this setting. (Default: Auto)

If anyone has other suggestions for 5700XT fixes, please let me know. This is driving me crazy.

Answer 1

I have a AMD RX 5700XT GPU paired with a Ryzen 2700x CPU, and have been having a ton black screen crashing while gaming. My computer stays on, sound stays on, but both my screens turn black. There's no way out of it other than a hard reboot...

One of the suggested solutions to this problem is to turn off PCIe 4.0 via the BIOS.

I have an X570 Aorus Elite Motherboard which supports PCIe 4.0. To turn it off, do I choose "Gen 3"? Mine is current set to "Auto".

The advice isn’t applicable to your hardware. While your motherboard might support PCIe 4.0 your processor doesn’t support it. Which means it doesn’t matter what option you select, because PCIe 4.0, is already disabled.

My guess to why I'm missing Gen 3 is because I'm using a AMD Ryzen 2700x. It could be that Ryzen 2*** series CPU's don't support Gen 4?

You indicated you can select PCIe 3.0, your unable to select any revision of PCIe, that your hardware doesn’t actually support. Your processor doesn’t actually support PCIe 4.0

You can try and explicitly select PCIe 3.0 but it doubt it will make a difference. You indicated the GPU works some of the times, if this problem was caused by a firmware setting, you likely would have been required to explicitly configure the slot to get it working initially.

If anyone has other suggestions for 5700XT fixes, please let me know. This is driving me crazy.

It sounds like this problem is something that has recently started to happen which indicates it’s a driver issue not a hardware issue. One way to verify that’s the case is to reinstall Windows, install the same AMD display drivers, and see if the problem can be reproduced.

If you can reproduce the issue, that’s an indication you have a hardware problem, likely caused by the GPU starting to fail. It can indeed be possible for a GPU to work, unless you are explicitly exercising the problem silicon, which would not happen, without running software that requires that silicon. If this problem happens without running software that changes the troubleshooting steps considerably.

Answer 2

Ryzen 2700x does not support PCIe 4.0

In fact, only Ryzen 3000 series processors support PCIe 4.0 (on AMD, I don't know about Intel).

If you did have a Ryzen 3000 series processor make sure you set this:

PCIe Slot Configuration => Gen 3

In your case with the 2700x, the motherboard defaults to Gen 3. That is because Gen 4 is not supported on a 2700x.

If you're having black screen issues with the 5700xt, these videos have some good suggestions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1dQoJtkI-c&t=366s

https://youtu.be/V5f6wJ5Jz_Q

As of now, it is well known that AMD GPU drivers are full of bugs. There may not be anything you can do to completely fix it until AMD fixes the bugs in the drivers.

Answer 3

In order for PCIE Gen 4 to run you need an x570 (I think the new B550 also support it), 3000 series Ryzen, 5700 or 5700xt, and a Gen 4 M.2 ssd. I recently just built a pc with all those components to have gen 4 and have been having the same issues you've mentioned. Black screens, crashes, weird slow boots. I've clean installed windows and drivers, did not help.

Then I decided to install the Amd display drivers without installing the AMD adrenaline and hard to say if the helped.

I decided to run some 3DMark benchmarks with the PCIe configuration forced to Gen 3 in BIOS. It ran every benchmark multiple times with no problems and the results were right around what to expect from the system. Then I tried running them with PCIe configuration forced Gen 4 in Bios, and bam, wouldn't run a single one of them. Tried forcing AUTO in Bios also, same result as Gen 4, crashed the benchmarks everytime. The graphs showed the GPU usage in Gen 4 never really got up to use and then right when the crash happened, the graphs showed GPU usage would spike up to 99 percent.

The only benchmark that it ran in Gen 4 was the PCIe featured benchmark, in which it show about 5.6 percent better performance over Gen 3. I have kept the PCIe config in Gen 3 and have been playing games with minimal issues. Still got some tweaking to do, and I really would like to know why the PC I build to run Gen 4 won't run Gen 4. Hopefully amd figures it out cause I play on upgrading when the next Gen 3rd party cards are release, and if the reference cards have the same issues, im going green team. Hopefully their cards support gen 4 in their next gens.