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GTX 970 and X58 system - No luck

Lysrin

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TL;DR: Anyone know of any known issues and fixes for a black screen when loading Windows 10 with DP, GTX 970, and X58 motherboards?

Details:

An additional upgrade I had planned for my daughter's PC this weekend after the Windows 10 reinstall, was to replace the 670 with a 970. No luck getting it to work, but it's a weird one. I have:

- the latest BIOS (still pretty old at this point);
- fresh install of the NVIDIA drivers on a fresh Windows 10 install;
- an 850W power supply so no issues there;
- ASUS P6T Deluxe; and
- monitor is a Dell U2711.

I could see the BIOS and the boot up title screen, even ExpressGate if I left it enabled (ASUS thing) but just a black screen once it started loading Windows. But no errors, beeps, just no image. And the monitor stayed on. So it thought it had signal. If it doesn't it switches to a low power state.

I was running on DP, so thought perhaps there was an incompatibility between the DP versions between monitor and GPU. I tried HDMI. Bingo! I got in. But 1080p as the default res on that monitor looks fuzzy and it wouldn't let me go higher. Reinstalled the drivers, and the monitor driver, to make sure everything was recognized correctly. Tried switching back to the DP cable. It worked! Looked great in Windows.

Thought it was solved, reboot PC with DP connected, back to the same black screen issue. No joy.

It is running fine with the 670 again now so this isn't a big deal, just bugs me that I don't know why it isn't working. Online people seem to be using a 970 on the x58 systems OK.

Don't do any big research effort for me, but just thought I would check if anyone ran across this before and had a "Oh! You just have to..." type statement to share.
 

Sagath

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Thats...strange.

It should work just find on DP with the 970, and the fact you got it running till reboot is doubly weird.

On top of that;

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...rmware-update-tool-displayport-1-3-1-4-a.html

I doubt it's the issue but did you try updating the vid card's firmware with this tool?

On top of that.... can't HDMI do the higher res? I thought it was only once you hit the higher refresh rates that you had to switch to DP.

970's have HDMI 2.0, which is 4k@60hz. Should be fine. DP is always more ideal if supported.

Why is it locking you out at 1080p? Very confusing. :ph34r:

Bad/cheap/poor cables? Thats about all Ive got...
 

Lysrin

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Doubly weird, I agree. It was one of those "what am I forgetting to do here?" moments.

I thought that HDMI should go higher too. That is what prompted me to make sure the NVIDIA drivers were installed and Dell monitor recognized in Windows as itself rather than Generic PnP Monitor. And I was running the monitor on DP from the 670 so I didn't forecast any issues at all with this. Expected just drop in and go.

Forgot about the Firmware update sswilson. It is worth a shot. The HDMI cable I tested with was taken from my home theatre set up just to test. It could be a poor cable Sagath, good suggestion, I honestly don't remember what I paid for it but it certainly isn't from the Dollar Store or anything. Put it in when we built the house and added the home theatre 9 years ago. It is fine in the home theatre set up but that is only a 1080p TV so nothing taxing for it there.

It does bug me that I don't understand why it won't work. So even though I said I was done with it after Sunday's efforts... given that I posted here I'm likely not done yet! ;) Whenever the answer is "it should work" I'm unlikely to leave it alone.

Thanks for the input guys!
 

enaberif

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Does the bios have a setting to allow different "x" speeds for the PCI-E slots? Have you tried a different slot? What does GPU-Z say about the card running for "x" speed?
 

Lysrin

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Does the bios have a setting to allow different "x" speeds for the PCI-E slots? Have you tried a different slot? What does GPU-Z say about the card running for "x" speed?

For the speed, only thing I could find was under the NorthBridge Chipset Configuration. There is a PCI Express Selector option, however it relates only to the Link Width of the second and third PCIe slots, not the primary one. The options are Auto, x8 x8, and x16 x1 modes. Seems more related to running SLI configurations. I left it at Auto, especially given the card is in the PCIe 1 slot, top one.

Did try a different slot. I had the same results running with the card in the middle slot. There are three PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots available on that board. I tried both the top and the middle, not the third bottom one. The top one is recommended for a single card set up according to the manual.

Didn't check GPU-Z. That might be worth a look.

Are you thinking that a wrong speed would somehow confuse Windows on startup?

One other thing I did not do was go and hunt down chipset and motherboard drivers. I figured that given the age of the board what Windows 10 would have installed would be newer and fine. However, that could be wrong perhaps?
 

enaberif

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For the speed, only thing I could find was under the NorthBridge Chipset Configuration. There is a PCI Express Selector option, however it relates only to the Link Width of the second and third PCIe slots, not the primary one. The options are Auto, x8 x8, and x16 x1 modes. Seems more related to running SLI configurations. I left it at Auto, especially given the card is in the PCIe 1 slot, top one.

Did try a different slot. I had the same results running with the card in the middle slot. There are three PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots available on that board. I tried both the top and the middle, not the third bottom one. The top one is recommended for a single card set up according to the manual.

Didn't check GPU-Z. That might be worth a look.

Are you thinking that a wrong speed would somehow confuse Windows on startup?

One other thing I did not do was go and hunt down chipset and motherboard drivers. I figured that given the age of the board what Windows 10 would have installed would be newer and fine. However, that could be wrong perhaps?

By default you shouldn't be having any issues so anything at this point is just odd.

Years ago I had a Antec TPQ-850 and whenever I booted the machine I was immediately greeted with a "insufficient power" error message. I did huge amounts of troubleshooting to find out that at the time there was issues between that PSU and the nvidia card I had.

So... stranger things have happened.
 

sswilson

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For the speed, only thing I could find was under the NorthBridge Chipset Configuration. There is a PCI Express Selector option, however it relates only to the Link Width of the second and third PCIe slots, not the primary one. The options are Auto, x8 x8, and x16 x1 modes. Seems more related to running SLI configurations. I left it at Auto, especially given the card is in the PCIe 1 slot, top one.

Did try a different slot. I had the same results running with the card in the middle slot. There are three PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots available on that board. I tried both the top and the middle, not the third bottom one. The top one is recommended for a single card set up according to the manual.

Didn't check GPU-Z. That might be worth a look.

Are you thinking that a wrong speed would somehow confuse Windows on startup?

One other thing I did not do was go and hunt down chipset and motherboard drivers. I figured that given the age of the board what Windows 10 would have installed would be newer and fine. However, that could be wrong perhaps?

I typically always install both the chipset and audio drivers.
 

Lysrin

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I typically always install both the chipset and audio drivers.

Well that'd be fine to do even if I stay with the 670. I was just concerned that the drivers would be out of date for Windows 10 so perhaps not the best choice. I'll look them up though at least. There isn't anything available on the ASUS site for the board newer than Windows 8.1, and then only a BIOS, latest is installed, and Marvell SAS firmware.

Windows 10 should install the latest drivers automatically, shouldn't it? does everythinh work fine until you update the drivers manually, or do things go wonky before then too?

For me, I only updated the NVIDIA drivers and the monitor. Not the chipset drivers. Updating the drivers didn't fix the problem.
 

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