Have you tried running with no overclock.

 

Sounds video card related to me, but it's always the first step when trouble shooting to reset bios to defaults.

Yes I tried default bios settings early on

Do you have, or know anyone with a spare graphics card you can swap out?
 
Having said that, and after reading this in your first post...

 

And even less frequently than this I'll get the same issue but Windows will finally load after 3-5 minutes.

 

 

 

If Windows isn't loading until 3-5 minutes has past then it suggests not video card related.

 

 

I'd check your PSU, with a PSU tester. Although it won't reveal intermittent faults.

 

It's worth testing RAM as well. Even if it doesn't sound like a RAM issue, it's still worth going through a process of elimination.

Ram is ok I tested with a bootable USB drive.

 

The 3-5 min thing hasn't happened in a long time - just a black screen with no drive activity.

 

Then again I haven't had any occurrence with 10 restarts or cold boots in the last few days while I've been reinstalling my software.

 

A few months ago I purchased a PSU tester (thermaltake Dr power 2) and all voltages were in tolerance - there was one value in milliseconds that was a little high though.

 

Ideally new components would be nice to test with - but from a practical perspective I won't be able to get any until I just upgrade my system in a few years.

You could try swapping out cables. Different SATA cables, and anything else you have spare.

 

I had an annoying issue once that turned out to be related to an ATX extender cable that was arching out.

 

Sorry I can't be more help, it's a tricky one.

Yeah it is... Hehe

 

I'm sure the problem will go away if I throw money at it lol!

Oh yes, money is always the fix.

My next plan is to RMA the PSU anyway just to rule it out.

 

Then I'll see if I have any warranty on the GPU - evga is usually a good company to work with.

 

And then after that .... literally....  I'll consider new components.... board, RAM, CPU - my friend might be able to give me his GPU.  (It's an AMD card but I'm willing to take my chances)

just test components one by one.

 

Take out 1 ram stick and see if it still happens, if it does, put it back and take the other one out.

 

Take out your video card and use the on board graphics to see if it still happens.

 

After that, you will be left with 2 possibilities: your mobo or your cpu, so in that case it would complicate things a bit.

 

In my opinion, your psu is not a likely cause. 

 

In my experience they either work, or don't.

 

Unless your psu doesn't have enough juice for your gpu, but you should be able to find that in the specs.

I've mem tested both sticks individually via USB boot drive.... passed after about an hour worth of runs - I'm doubting it's RAM.

 

I don't think I have onboard video or do I?  In that case I can't play BF4 or FSX to test for those DX related errors.

Hey Ryan,

Had a similar problem on my Asus G53s laptop.  Searched all over for answers, then got onto a thread about the hiberfil.sys being corrupt and randomly causing the issue.

Read up on hibernation, the hiberfil.sys file, how to delete it (with command prompts) and re-enable if you use hibernation.

After pulling my hair out for months on a totally random boot to blank screen, with lights and drive working, this completely solved my issue!  I realized hibernation is much more trouble than its worth...just having a little self-discipline and saving/closing files and apps, then using sleep or shutting down altogether is the best way.

 

And as a side benefit, you get gigs of spaced freed up on your HDD (or SDD), and my boot times have decreased to ridiculously short times!  It makes sense when you think that your system has to read that enormous  hiberfil.sys when it boots from hibernation, and if its corrupt, it hangs (blank screen) and only if you're lucky will it time out and try to load...after many minutes like you describe.

This route is not for anyone who routinely leaves unsaved documents and apps open and expects to have them open to where they left off.  Of course...I would recommend against this in the first place, and the 10 seconds it takes to save/close/sleep or shut down altogether is more than made up in the zippy boot time you'll get from not having hibernation on.  :lol:

I turned it off a while ago, have not missed it a bit, and never had the blank screen issue again.  If you try it, let me know how it turns out.  You really can't lose anything if your hiberfil.sys is corrupt anyway...it will never boot properly, and by deleting it and rebooting using the proper cmd line switches, it builds a fresh one that will work from that point forward, unless it gets corrupt again.  

Very interesting reading too, finding out about the hibernation process...and actually how easy it is for the hiberfil.sys to get corrupt...wonky drivers, power surge (or outage), apps behaving badly, part of the file getting written to a bad sector.

 

And remember this file can be 10gbs+, so when you're getting low on disk space, the chances of the write process hitting a bad sector are pretty good while its trying to look for contiguous space...and so many other little things we don't think about (or should have to) on a daily basis...until we get a computer that wont boot properly. :blink:  

 

Regards,

Steve Dra

Thanks but I've had these black screens on 3 different drives / 3 different windows install.

 

I'll check into it though. Would it matter if I had sleep disabled? I'm pretty sure I have power setting to max performance.

Thanks but I've had these black screens on 3 different drives / 3 different windows install.

 

I'll check into it though. Would it matter if I had sleep disabled? I'm pretty sure I have power setting to max performance.

As I understand it, sleep and hibernate are 2 different functions (and there is also another setting called hybrid sleep, which as the name implies a combo of both features).  You can have one disabled without affecting the the other.  So if sleep was disabled, your system still could hibernate after a certain amount of inactivity.

 

Just do a Google® search on a few of these terms, read-up on them and see which direction you'd like to go.

Your decision to turn off hibernation won't have any adverse effects as long as you remember its off and you don't plan to walk away from your computer with a bunch of unsaved files open. 

 

Regards,

Steve Dra