JBI wrote:

Ok, Ive been round and round with the developers on this issue now and
time to turn here. I am running a program called Affinity Photo on a
Dell XPS 420 with 8 GB Ram. I am using both Win 10 and 7 (dual boot
with either OS chosen at startup).

The problem I'm having is that within an hour or so fairly heavy use of
the program, I get a sudden black screen with no cursor... nothing...
and the only way I can get everything back is to reboot. The developers
are quite active when it comes to resolving issues and I have sent them
crash reports, but I don't always get such reports with the black screen
issue, only if I am getting exception errors.

They keep telling me that it looks like some incompatibility between my
video card driver and their program, but say the driver is at fault and
not the program. My big issue with this is that I have tried using two
separate video cards, with former card uninstalled and latest drivers
reinstalled per respective card, and the black screens still occur no
matter the card.

The two cards I have tried are the ATI Radeon HD 3870 and the Ge Force
210. I get black screens with each card within an hour or two after
running heavy image editing/processing operations in Affinity. I get no
black screening with any video intensive games, nor any other
application, only Affinity, yet Affinity says it's likely the video
driver (but both drivers?).

If anyone has some ideas, I would sure welcome them. As I say, mostly
black screen in Win 10 but sometimes 7 as well. Latest video drivers
used for each card.

Been trying to nail this down for over a month now. From the beginning
after Affinity install have I had the black screening. I am trying beta
versions, same thing. I have been running Win in clean boot mode, same
thing.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions!

Before you installed the Affinity program, were you loading your
computer as heavily? I don't know that program but some graphics
programs, especially editors or converters, will load the CPU (and GPU).
I've seen complaints by Affinity Designer users of a constantly high CPU
load when the program is loaded but idle. A higher load generates more
heat, especially if constantly elevated. The users noted their
temperatures were consistently far higher and the fans spinning on high
while Designer was loaded, so they had to exit the program rather than
leave it loaded. Seem affected by the type of docs left open and how
many: the more docs concurrently open and more complex then the higher
the CPU usage, and that equates into more heat. Apparently cycling
(tabbing) through the docs gets the program to reduce its CPU
consumption. See:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/ind...age-when-idle/
(a community to get focused help on THAT software)

Looks like AD (and possibly AP) are computationally intensive even when
they aren't doing anything, just sitting idle with half a dozen image
docs left open in the programs. There's something wrong with their
software. That thread went from this spring to late fall of this year,
so I doubt the bug has been fixed.

Desktops will usually run okay at constant higher temperatures. They
are more open, airflow is easier (less resistance to movement), and
there is more than one fan moving the air (PSU and case fan pushing out,
CPU fan moving air, GPU pushing out, and optionally front fans pushing
in). Laptops only have one fan and airflow is restricted, so they don't
run reliably at high temperatures and will either throttle the CPU (gets
slow) or stop the hardware for self-protection. We don't know on what
type of computer you are having the hanging black screen; however, since
you mentioned switching video cards, yours isn't a laptop, or smaller.

You sure there isn't dust and lint piled up atop the components (those
are thermal insulators that prevent heat from escaping from the
components), or blocking airflow through the heatsink fins (CPU, GPU,
memory, chipset) or the fans (CPU, GPU, PSU, case)? Even flat ribbon
cables can present huge dams against airflow if they are positioned
perpendicular to the airflow.

Have you checked inside the unidentified computer that no heatsinks fell
off? It happens. Are all the fans still spinning? When the load goes
up and temperature rises, do the fans speed up? There are monitoring
programs that will tell you the temperatures of the CPU, GPU, case, and
drives. For some reason, the salvage computer that I use could not
thermally regulate the CPU fan speed, so I got Speedfan which monitors
and shows various temperatures and will control the fans to make sure
they are spinning fast enough to cool properly. The only fan I don't
have it control is the GPU since its firmware handles that. My video
card has 2 fans and one went bad (too much bearing friction slowing its
RPM but also stalling when it would start to spin up). Instead of
buying a new card, I bought a fan kit for that brand and model at eBay.
A lot less noise now from the video card's fans.

Install some temperature monitoring software (something that shows a
history, so you can see the rise and fall of temperatures) that load on
Windows startup or when you login. Shutoff the computer and let it cool
for a hour, or more. Turn it on, load AP with whatever typical set of
docs you open in AP, and watch the temperatures of various devices (CPU,
GPU, case, drives). I suspect you have a heat-related problem caused by
buggy software constantly consuming too many CPU cycles even when idle.