About a week and a half ago, I completed a project that had been more than a month in the making: I put together a custom PC build. This was something that I had thinking about for a long time; the laptops I had been using for many years were no longer fitting my needs, desktops generally last longer, they're often more powerful and can be upgraded in more aspects, and it'd be nice to have a larger screen to draw and play games on. (Also, laptops are usually purchased because of their portability and I just wasn't carrying mine around much for it to be useful in that area.)
The entire process was genuinely nerve-wracking. Building a PC is not cheap with many of the parts costing hundreds of dollars (the GPU was something like $660) and if I wasn't careful putting it together, I could easily fry the entire build and have to start over again. At one point, I actually got so overwhelmed while building it that I had to take a break for the night and sleep so I could return to it the next morning calmer and more clear-headed. I was that scared of messing up somehow.
Welp, it's finally put together and almost a week and a half later, it's been doing perfectly in almost every aspect. It runs pretty cool, CPU and GPU are amazing, all of my programs and games run well, and otherwise it's everything I could have hoped for. Much better experience than my laptop in every aspect. However, there is exactly one recurring issue I keep running into, one that technically isn't a major problem, but is nonetheless extremely annoying and lowkey worrisome since it keeps happening.
The monitor will occasionally go black and then come back on after a few seconds.
This problem is so, so weird in every single way. First, the monitor doesn't actually turn off; the display just goes black for 2 - 3 seconds before returning to normal. Second, when or if it decides to happen is completely random; sometimes I'll have the computer running for three or four hours and nothing happens, other times it'll have only been running for 20 minutes before a screen blackout happens. And, on top of that, pretty much every time it has happened was when the PC was probably under the lowest load it could have; the only things I've had open are Mozilla Firefox, Discord, and MAYBE Spirit City: Lofi Sessions, which is HARDLY the most intensive software I could have running. And I have done just about EVERYTHING to try and fix this issue based on things I've read about online, which includes
- I checked and made sure all my cables were hooked in properly.
- I got an entirely new HDMI cable.
- I initially had the HDMI hooked into the motherboard; swapped over to the GPU like I was supposed to. (Which definitely improved my ability to run games on higher graphics settings, yet still didn't fix the problem.)
- I lowered the screen refresh rate, which is how most people online fixed it.
- I raised the refresh to the maximum my monitor can handle, which is 120 hz. Problem still happens.
- I updated my graphics drivers and even did a total clean install of those. No dice there, either.
Finally, out of desperation, I went and got a new monitor entirely; clearly, the issue was that the monitor I got was defective, right? It was faulty in some way or had gotten messed up somehow when it was being shipped. I can't even return it at this point anyway and its sister model is on sale, so if the problem is the monitor itself, then replacing it should fix the problem entirely.
Two days later, I got the same problem with the new monitor. I can't imagine my luck is so bad I got two defective monitors in a row, so that means it has to be another issue entirely.
One of the things I'm currently doing is keeping track of when the blackouts happen; the date, the time, how long the computer had been on, which programs were on, and what things I was doing with them. If there's some kind of pattern, like a specific time or a specific program running when the blackouts happen, that might reveal where the source of the problem is. Otherwise, I'm just going to have to hope a couple of other solutions I've discovered since getting the second monitor might work.
(Speaking of the second monitor, as the issue isn't actually the monitor itself, I should probably return it already. I still got time to do so and get a full refund, I actually went and kept the original packaging this time, and it'd be nice to have only spent something like $340 on my display stuffs instead of $570. Electronics are so woefully expensive.)
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rynling
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