Early adopters of Nvidia’s latest GeForce RTX 50 Series graphics cards are reporting recurring display issues, with the new hardware delivering unwanted and unexpected blank screens.
Scores of users across social media, forums, and Reddit, have reportedly experienced the same dilemma, with the joy of a new graphics card quickly turning to despair.
In the interests of full disclosure, Club386 has witnessed similar during testing. While RTX 5090 ran our battery of benchmarks without a hitch for my initial RTX 5090 Founders Edition review, subsequent RTX 5080 cards proved problematic.
Our range of issues ranged from blank screens to massive Windows stutter, and the intermittent nature of the fault made diagnosis all the more problematic. Uncertain of the root cause, we tried myriad fixes that included clean installing Windows, switching from PCIe 5 to PCIe 4, and even trying different power supplies.
Today, a fully configured system from a well-respected UK system integrator has arrived at Club386 HQ outfitted with AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor and GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card. At first boot, the system behaves as expected. At second boot, we’re hit by the same blank screen, which leads us to believe the issue is potentially widespread.
Our internal testing is ongoing, but for the time being, forcing a PCIe slot to run at 4.0 x16 appears to be the most successful remedy, though even this doesn’t appear to guarantee success.
Online chatter has led some to suggest the bug could be a result of Nvidia’s reengineered PCIe interface, which is now detached from the main PCB, but it is too early to speculate. Users may recall that RTX 4090 and RTX 4080 faced similar black-screen issues at launch that were addressed through firmware updates for both cards. We can only hope this latest hiccup is no more sinister and can be rectified through a software patch.
Club386 has reached out to Nvidia for comment.
