PC Monitor Blackout

Location
Vancouver BC
Name
Graham
My 6 year old Samsung S32D 850T desktop monitor has excellent color rendition, even illumination and works perfectly most of the time. This issue that happens usually once a day, occasionally a couple of times in a day. The monitor goes black for about 2 seconds, then comes back just as quickly. There's no fade out or back in - it's like flipping a light switch. Today when it happened I had a document up, sitting there, not typing or scrolling. It goes black "one steamboat, two steamboats" and is back like nothing happened. Last night it happened while I was typing. The text entered during the blackout was on the document, so it's not the CPU. The power supply is a 600 watt Gold that's only a few years old (the spec called for 500 watts so I went for a reserve). It's a water cooled i7 chipset on a 3 year old motherboard running Win 10.
Does anyone have an Idea of what's causing this issue?
 
Could be the video card, do you have integrated graphics on your MB that you could plug into instead? Also, maybe roll back driver on the card?
I do have graphics on the MB but they don't go to 1440 and I need the graphics card for the monitor I have (use it all for work and stupidly busy these days). The drivers have been updated several times but I don't think it's a graphics card issue. The problem's been going on for probably 6 months.
 
My monitor did that for several months. The exact same symptoms but with a Dell laptop and monitor, connected by HDMI.

The frequency of the blackouts was a little less - perhaps twice a week or so. The fault cleared itself as mysteriously as it arrived with no intervention from me, which suggests that it was a software / driver thing rather than hardware (?) I basically put up with it while it was happening, and I haven't thought about it for weeks until now.

Of course, it may be that the fault is still happening occasionally but I no longer register it. I could be sitting here typing away when sudde

(one crocodile, two crocodile)

Oh yeah, that thing again.

-R
 
My monitor did that for several months. The exact same symptoms but with a Dell laptop and monitor, connected by HDMI.

The frequency of the blackouts was a little less - perhaps twice a week or so. The fault cleared itself as mysteriously as it arrived with no intervention from me, which suggests that it was a software / driver thing rather than hardware (?) I basically put up with it while it was happening, and I haven't thought about it for weeks until now.

Of course, it may be that the fault is still happening occasionally but I no longer register it. I could be sitting here typing away when sudde

(one crocodile, two crocodile)

Oh yeah, that thing again.

-R
Thanks for the information. I'll just keep an eye on it and also keep an eye on the local supply of 32" monitors in case this one goes dark and doesn't come back up. I could probably go out, pick up a new monitor and have it hooked up in an hour or so. Still, don't want the spectre of computer downtime hovering over me. It's bad enough when Windows updates send me back to the techs because my computer doesn't work about every 15 months or so.
 
Probably more amusing than helpful, but my left monitor has blackouts every time I sit down or stand up… caused by static electricity between the synthetic seat cover and my synthetic (hiking) pants…
I’m now calling those pants my “thunder pants” :D
(and I put a cotton cover onto the seat )
 
Last edited:
Ever since I got a new computer 3 or 4 years ago (Dell "precision workstation" desktop with Radeon WX 5100 graphics card and a Dell monitor) I had exactly the same problem: a few minutes after turning the computer on, the display blanks out for 2 seconds then comes back. At first I thought that it was switching from the on-board Intel UHD graphics [GPU0] to the Radeon [GPU1], but then I observed Task Manager/Performance after boot up and found that it was using the Radeon all along, and during the blank out nothing appeared to happen. It always does this after turning computer on, and does it only once as far as I am aware, so I was very surprised to learn that this happens to others too!
I'll try @agentlossing's suggestion and check if the integrated graphics card solves the blanking problem.
 
Back
Top