Sudden black screen while gaming, only hard reset helps

[zhorvatic]

Hi,

While gaming, every once in a while, I receive a Black display screen. Sound, controls, keyboard functions etc., still work. I can see that by, e.g. pressing fn+f4 to toggle keyboard light or sound volume. I can still hear my game in the background after this happens.

System information:

OS Windows 10 Home 10.0.19041 Build 19401

Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver version 460.89 Release Date 12/15/2020

RTX 2070 Super with Max Q design

i7 10750H @ 2.60 running at load at 4.2 GHz

Performance control is set at the Performance setting.

Thermal Control is set to the Auto setting, and the manual fan is set to 50%.

Battery (plugged in) set at Best Performance

At idle (e.g. as I'm writing this), the temperatures are CPU 50C and GPU 44C. 

At loads (e.g. when playing WoW: Shadowlands), the temperatures are CPU 80-90+ and GPU 70+ (with fps locked to 60 to reduce heat)

After every instance of this error, I have to do a hard reset to get the display back on line and have done it over 20 times in the past week. 

I have also checked the event viewer to see if there's a log of an error, but there seems to be nothing noteworthy, not even warnings. 

This only happens in games, under heavy load and high temperatures. 

I have tried downclocking the GPU, thinking that would solve it, but even with -200 Core and -400 Mem on the RTX 2070 Max Q, the display crash still keeps happening. The system is currently set back to the default state when I purchased a laptop not even 2 weeks ago.

[zhorvatic]

In World of Warcraft, switching back to DirectX 11 reduces the number of crashes considerably, but not completely. 

It leads me to believe that drivers might be an issue or the laptop power source (assuming more power is utilized when using Dx12 and ray tracing)

Anyone?

[praveenbv]

Hi@zhorvatic, Welcome to the HP Support Community!

Here's what you need to do, to identify the issue and resolve it accordingly:

• If not done already, check if it works fine on the BIOS screen to identify if it's either a hardware or a software issue:
  • If it works fine on the BIOS (Accessed while tapping F10 during a restart) it's a software issue & I suggest attaching an alternate monitor to your device and creating a new user account to check if that works better, for starters)
  • However, if it doesn't work within the BIOS either, I'm afraid it's a hardware malfunction.

While you respond to that, I have a few more steps that should help: 

Perform a power reset (no data loss) using these steps: Click here, proceed to next step if this works

Attempt to run a test from the HP hardware diagnostic tool, using this link: Click here for details.

If the issue appears on the diagnostics, it could again, determine a hardware failure,

If they don't appear on bios & the hardware tests passed: please update the BIOS & Chip-set drivers from the HP website using this link: Click here

if the issue persists, reinstall Windows using the recovery partition or the recovery media to fix the issue,
use this link for details on performing the recovery: Click here

Hope this helps! Keep me posted. 

Please click “Accept as Solution” if you feel my post solved your issue, it will help others find the solution.

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Have a great day!