Hi! A few days ago I installed zorin 17.3. core. Installation went fine and everything is working like they should. Except the screen goes black randomly like when I'm browsing internet. If I'm listening music it keeps playing (after little stuttering) but the screen is black. The power is still on, there is background light so the screen is not totally off. The computer doesn't react to anything like ctrl+alt+f1 or f2. So I force boot the computer and everything works as normal until new black screen happens.
I have tried to isolate the problem (changing graphicsdrivers, soundcard and so on), and at the moment it seems that limiting framerate at 60hrz is working. I have 170hrz monitor and obviously I like to use that framerate. What can be done?
Here is the specs:
AMD® Ryzen 5 5600x 6-core processor × 12
NVIDIA Corporation GA104 [GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Lite Hash Rate]
64-bit
x11
NVIDIA Driver Version: 570.169
DisplayPort
Also l'm Linux newbie so I need clear instructions if someone knows anything.
If Windows is installed: Is in Windows Fast Start-Up disabled?
Did You try instead DisplayPort a HDMI Connection?
Did You try a different Driver Version? 550 or 535 for Example?
Because You are using a Nvidia Card: Does Your System run in Wayland or X11? You can check that in Settings>About. When it is in Wayland, I would recomment to switch to X11/Xorg because it works on zorin 17 better with Nvidia Graphics.
To switch, go to the Login Screen (not the Lock Screen). Simply reboot for that. On the Login Screen click on Your Profile so that the Password Field appears. When it is appeared, You should see in the bottom right Corner a Gear Icon. Click on it and choose ''Zorin Desktop on Xorg'' and then log in.
Should switching to Xorg alone not help, stay on it, open the Terminal and type xrandr (this is a Tool for set up Resolutions and only works on Xorg) and post the Output of it here please?
Are Secure Boot and Fast Boot in BIOS disabled? -Yes secure boot is disabled but not sure about fast boot, gotta check it out.
If Windows is installed: Is in Windows Fast Start-Up disabled? -No Windows, just Zorin
Did You try instead DisplayPort a HDMI Connection? -Yes and that messed up the resolution so I couldn't do anything. It just showed some part of the screen.
Did You try a different Driver Version? 550 or 535 for Example? -These I haven't tested, I tried the 575 (proprietary, tested) version. The crashes started then and I decided to stay with the drivers that installation gave.
Does Your System run in Wayland or X11? -Yes it's X11
Today there has been zero black screens with 60hrz. I also enabled Gsync. I just changed refresh rate to 170hrz to see if it's really the problem.
Here is the xrandr:
Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 2560 x 1440, maximum 32767 x 32767
DP-0 connected primary 2560x1440+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 1mm x 1mm
2560x1440 59.94 + 169.83* 164.80 143.86 119.88
1920x1080 143.85 119.88 60.00 59.94
1680x1050 59.95
1440x900 59.89
1280x1024 75.02 60.02
1280x720 119.88 59.94
1024x768 75.03 70.07 60.00
800x600 75.00 72.19 60.32 56.25
720x576 50.00
720x480 59.94
640x480 75.00 72.81 59.94
DP-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-3 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
HDMI-1 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-4 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
DP-5 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
Do you have anything else running on your system while doing these other tasks that can create these sudden black screens? For instance, a long time ago when I was using Discord, that would create black screens randomly (and it took me a while to figure out it was the culprit, because I kept looking at other things). So disabling hardware acceleration for that application explicitly solved my issue in that case.
You could also take a look into the power saving settings. Zorin often doesn't recognize when only music or videos are playing and nothing else and turns on screensaver or goes into suspend. For such activities you could turn off the powersaving/screensaving functions or install espresso or caffeine.
Okay so it wasn't Brave's hardware acceleration, I was browsing and the black screen happened again and acceleration was disabled. There was no other app running. And this happened after I changed to 170hrz. Now it's again 60hrz. Fast boot mode was enabled so I disabled that.
This really seems to be driver issue.
There stands 59.94 + 169.83 ... could it be that the 170Hz maybe something like a Boost? Maybe only for Gaming Stuff available? And normally it runs with 60Hz?
Did You tried a lower Hz Value? There are 3 others.
I second this as a possibility. Some monitors require you to specifically go into the settings on the monitor and allow "overdrive" modes to occur, so sometimes a monitor will only allow 120 or 144, but "overdrive" higher to like 170, at usually a slight reduction to image quality.
The OP might be correct that it could be driver related. I have a Dell 32" 4K monitor running at 144 Hertz, using the Nvidia 555 driver, and I have no issues. I also have "Secure Boot" & "Fast Boot" disabled in the BIOS, and I'm running in Xorg.
Thanks everybody for the help! Nothing is resolved atm but I'm trying out these suggestions one at a time. Let's hope that some of them works.
About fractional scaling, it was off all the time.
"There stands 59.94 + 169.83 ... could it be that the 170Hz maybe something like a Boost? Maybe only for Gaming Stuff available? And normally it runs with 60Hz?
Did You tried a lower Hz Value? There are 3 others." -That also caught my eye. But with Windows I always used 170hz and it was fine. But I understand with Linux most of things work differently from Windows.
BTW I turned the AMD freesync premium off from the monitor, let's see if that helps.
I believe in this case, Windows has more access to monitor controls than Linux typically does. So Windows can enable settings in a monitor that need to be enabled for a setting that it needs, versus Linux which (probably outside of some edge cases) needs to have it set on the monitor to make it actually function correctly.
This was also the case in the past of tech such as freesync, windows would change it automatically, but in Linux I needed to manually set the monitor before it would function correctly.
Well now I'm confused, got the black screen and refresh rate was 60hz. Freesycn was enabled, I was too hasty put it back on and now I disabled it again. Bet it doesn't solve anything. But does this mean that it's not framerate issue? Don't know. Drivers are next in line, but I'm worried it will mess up something, last time nvidia x server looked differerent when I changed drivers, like there was only 2 options. It was much simpler than now.
Just out of curiosity, if you try something more demanding like a game at 60hz, does the crashing still occur? I know you said it's stable listening to music and having brave opening etc, but just wanting to check if the greater demand on the card is causing something.
Unfortunately, I don't know what could fix the issue. Perhaps you could also check the cable connection to the monitor (whether it is plugged in properly), try an HDMI cable or another DP cable, see if the graphics card is loose...
Can you please tell the brand/model of your computer? Perhaps so we can find out more about this problem.
While I don't know for certain, if that is the OP's issue, I can confirm that I had a bad HDMI cable, and a BenQ monitor kept going into a standby state. As soon as I replaced the HDMI cable, it fixed the issue.
Well I'll be damned if this was the fix. I found third displayport and it's next to hdmi (and after the hdmi comes 2 DPs, those I tested before) and now everything seems to work. I have been watching videos and playing games and so on several hours (170hz) and not a single crash has occured. Fingers crossed! I'll report back after a few days if it really worked or not.
