Black Screen

gecko

gecko

Charter Member
I've been having an issue where after playing CFS3 for 5-10 minutes, the screen goes black, the keys don't work, and the sound loops. The only way out is a hard shutdown. It began happening after installing the game War Thunder and initially only affected that game, but now it does the same in CFS3. I've since uninstalled War Thunder and done a clean install of my graphics card drivers but am still getting the problem. Any help is much appreciated!

My system:

Dell Studio XPS 8100
Windows 7 Home Premium Service Pack 1 64bit
Intel Core i7 CPU 2.93ghz
8gb RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 240 driver 311.06
 
Tried that, no go. I have an alternate theory now: I have a lot of usb devices plugged into my machine, and had just added another (wireless adapter) around that same time, could be that my power supply is overloaded. So I scaled some things back/unplugged to see if it will fix it, or am I totally off base with this?
 
gecko said:
Tried that, no go. I have an alternate theory now: I have a lot of usb devices plugged into my machine, and had just added another (wireless adapter) around that same time, could be that my power supply is overloaded. So I scaled some things back/unplugged to see if it will fix it, or am I totally off base with this?
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Well? Did that fix it?
 
So far so good, but I've not yet been able to try it with the game running for a long time. We'll see...:wiggle:
 
After some research it's looking more and more like a power supply issue. The amount of time CFS3 will run before the BSOD is getting shorter and shorter, I'm down to a couple minutes now. I think I'll be essentially out of action till I can scrounge the cash to get a new one.:angryfir: I would welcome any alternate theories.
 
gecko said:
After some research it's looking more and more like a power supply issue. The amount of time CFS3 will run before the BSOD is getting shorter and shorter, I'm down to a couple minutes now. I think I'll be essentially out of action till I can scrounge the cash to get a new one.:angryfir: I would welcome any alternate theories.
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Well you might want to monitor your heat levels on the video card. Maybe the Video crad fan isn't working?
Maybe open your case and really blow the dust and dirt out if you haven't yet. I had a problem with another game along time ago and my case was really full of dust and it fixed it.
 
gecko said:
After some research it's looking more and more like a power supply issue. The amount of time CFS3 will run before the BSOD is getting shorter and shorter, I'm down to a couple minutes now. I think I'll be essentially out of action till I can scrounge the cash to get a new one.:angryfir: I would welcome any alternate theories.
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Hi Gecko,

I've had similar issues recently.
- the main problem came down to not having the CPU well seated with gunk. This made the CPU overheat. At first I could play for 10 minutes but the time got shorter and shorter.
- Another thing I've done is quite simple. I had an enormous number of things running from the one multi-board from one power socket (computer power, monitor power, external HD power, scanner power, etc). I ran an extension lead from a nearby power socket and ran ONLY the PSU from it - this even made a difference to the quality of the video output!

HTH
 
I'll give it a try, I was in there not too long ago and tried to clean stuff, but maybe I just knocked a dust bunny into the wrong spot. Thanks.
 
No luck yet, gave it a thorough dusting, plugged the psu into its own surge protector and outlet, even set up a small household fan directly in front of the vent with a freezer ice pack on it and no change.
 
Actually re-reading your first symptoms, my guess would be its a CPU issue not video card. Things like sound looping would not be affected by a dodgy video card or drivers. Hence one thing to look at is re-seating the CPU using the proprietary gunk.

IIRC, one of my Nvidia tools allows monitoring of CPU temp as well as Various video card temps and fan speeds. Do you have something that tells you your CPU temperature? If its anything like my comp, you will have less and less time to test each time you start up.

HTH,
 
Uhg, sounds expensive. I'm not sure what you mean here:
Daiwilletti said:
Hence one thing to look at is re-seating the CPU using the proprietary gunk.
Click to expand...

Fortunately, only CFS3 is affected at this point. Also toying with the idea of doing a clean install of windows on the chance that something got messed up when I installed War Thunder.
 
gecko said:
Uhg, sounds expensive. I'm not sure what you mean here:

Fortunately, only CFS3 is affected at this point. Also toying with the idea of doing a clean install of windows on the chance that something got messed up when I installed War Thunder.
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Oh, that changes things. If its only CFS3 and not a general crash whatever you are working on, then its not so likely to be the CPU overheating.

I've had problems with CFS3 freezing and sound looping, but its usually because of a glitch in the install of an aircraft, which becomes a problem when the game tries to spawn. But no black screen! That suggests hardware, CFS3 is graphics intensive so we're heading back towards looking at the vid card/drivers!

Just a left field thought - what about backing off sound acceleration to medium under DXdiag?
 
Yes, just CFS3 and War Thunder (now uninstalled). The problem started with the very first time I ran War Thunder and I did not encounter any problems with CFS3 for a couple weeks afterwards, then they started and gradually became worse. I keep very tight control of my install and know for 99.99% certain that it isn't a problem with something I've done to the game.

Graphics drivers have been rolled back to pre-War Thunder state and then the lastest drivers given a clean install.

I've looked for the sound acceleration settings before for a different purpose and couldn't find them. Where are they in windows 7?

Thanks

Daniel
 
Hi in Win 7 go to C:\Windows\System32\dxdiag.exe. I always set this up as a shortcut on my desktop because it has useful stuff in it.

When you run this you will find a tab under which you can adjust sound acceleration. Slide back to medium rather than full acceleration. Just a left field option to reduce demand on the system.
 
gecko said:
Mine has no sliders, or anything to adjust.
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True :isadizzy:! My Win XP version has the option; but I see my Win 7 computer doesn't! Another classic example of "progress" as far as Microsnot propeller-heads are concerned: presumably we are too stupid to adjust our own computers? What a pain.
 
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