HDMI Video Cut-outs but WITH Audio Still On

The HDMI cable is a reliable AmazonBasics 1.3 with High Speed Data Transfer and Ethernet cable that is new. I have another of the same cable that is 1 year old and I switched it out yet the issue remains, so it's unlikely that it's an issue with the cable. Besides that, a cable issue would not freeze my laptop.

did all of that. First two responses and already I realize no one is reading what I wrote. The games are all long prior to my GPU driver and the laptop is not overheating.

Great advice. I did actually give my HDMI port a good gentle wipe and air blast. It was clean and now it's pristine. Chances were ever low it was a connection issue due to dust. The issues remains.

As for the black TV screen, what happens is the laptop freezes, then about 5 seconds later the TV says "no signal" and gives me the screensaver. The huge delay between the laptop freezing and the TV saying no signal really makes me think that the TV is not the culprit.

My laptop is 7 years old. I take it apart monthly for a dusting and to check the thermal grease. I just gave it a cleaning and reapplied the Arctic Silver 7 only a few days ago, but this issue has persisted for over a year.

Chances are simply that the GPU may not overheat since it has its own fan, plus a nearby CPU fan. I mean, this laptop is 11lbs. of hugeness. It never overheats no matter what.

I will say this, your idea about the HDMI port may actually be correct since whenever I plug in an HDMI it never scans properly the first time, and I have to unplug it and plug it back in 100% of the time. While this may also be a driver issue, either way it'd mean I'm boned since the GPU is not worth the dough to replace, drivers are a no-go and an upgrade is basically impossible (and worth even less of the money).

In the meanwhile I updated my firewall settings since I saw a firewalls exception UAC warning from Windows. Maybe this issue will just disappear. I should be building my own computer soon, hopefully really soon. Somehow I wonder even if I fix this another issue will pop up over and over til the poor thing just dies a dog's death.

The card itself is definitely not overheating. I double checked with CPUID Hardware Monitor. The card itself under load hits 85-90C which is standard for this card. Fan profiles simply keep it there for reasons I don't know, but pretty much all AMD/ATI cards at stock for some reason are kept at 90C and under. Playing my games it was averaging 85C.

I'm simply baffled why this keeps happening. It would seem like an overheat since the problem only happens after about 30 minutes of gameplay fairly regularly. Maybe an hour sometimes. But the card's temps simply aren't anything unusual at all

Hi again,

Yes, this issue ONLY happens over HDMI to any external display. Doesn't matter if I connect this to a TV or my projector. AND it only happens during gaming too. I can keep my laptop connected to any display over HDMI for 15 hours without a single issue no matter what I do (movies, internet, zipping files, video editing, etc). However, gaming for some reason likes to crash.

I did as you asked with the registry clean and somehow it at least allowed me to install the latest drivers. I had been using ATI CCC 10.8 for 3 years and now out of the blue I'm able to install AMD CCC 13.9 with only one of the 6 issues I had in the past. I'm strongly tempted to reinstall again to see if I can even remove that one remaining issue (random, unpredictable total system freeze). Before, I had a host of issue with the 13.9 drivers. I am going to play Mass Effect 2 some more and if in a couple hours it does not freeze then I'll know it was a driver malfunction.

I'm afraid access to my BIOS is almost totally restricted. Under and Overclocking simply cannot happen, not even with SetFSB. So that's out. That wouldn't make much sense anyway seeing how it's been 7 years of nonstop limit-pushing without issue, and the issue only occurs with HDMI. I can play forever with my laptop screen with no issues.

In the meanwhile, this here may help you figure out what is going on. I think these are two defining clues to the issue and two more which may be connected:

Clue 1: When I leave my laptop plugged into the TV over HDMI and shutdown, often when I reboot with the HDMI still plugged in the screen is magenta and all the fonts and pictures are garbled as if they went through a purple paper shredder. Unplugging the HDMI and plugging it back in (as many as four times) solves this issue eventually and the screen looks fine. This may indicate some port detection issue or a driver malfunction. Or maybe the port is simply worn out and one of the metal prongs is not straight anymore. I have plugged and unplugged HDMI's hundreds and hundreds of times over the years. At least 300 plugs and 300 hundred unplugs. Not sure how much that is or how many times a port can stay in good shape, but something tells me if I did that with my USBs they'd have long since fallen out. I'm really not sure though. A hunch is nothing to go on.

Clue 2: Never, ever, never am I able to simply plug in the HDMI once and have it connect correctly. Every FIRST time I connect an HDMI the screen appears on the TV garbled. I cannot even recall a single time from the day I bought this laptop to now that I was ever able to simply plug in an HDMI without it taking more than one try to have it work properly. SO I unplug it and plug it back in and voila, perfect. The issue here is that the HDMI port has given no indication that it is wearing out or that anything new has happened. This has been an issue since day one, but it is solved so quickly and easily I never gave it any thought. 7 years later it's still barely even an annoyance compared to the other horrid issues I've encountered.

Clue 3: I see at least one dark green screen for about 1 second when I switch resolutions and refresh rates (switch to 24Hz for Blu-rays, 30Hz for TV shows and back again to 60Hz for gaming I see a lot of green). Also when I plug in an HDMI I see a green screen for a split second before it either connects properly or I get that purple screen described above. From what I understand green is normal for GPU's, blue screens are death, but what the hell is purple???

Clue 4: This probably has nothing to do with anything, but playing any kind of flash videos has become nearly impossible. This probably just relates to a driver issue since my GPU is now as older than the pharaohs. I'm not sure why but if I download a flash video and play it, I can play literally 50 or more 1080p flash videos and none of them even skip or anything. This might be an acceleration issue, since GPU hardware acceleration is used for videos over internet but when I download them they play 100% on the CPU. I use Cyberlink PowerDVD on my computer though for all sorts of Blu-rays and DVD's and they use hardware acceleration and lots of other intense GPU features all with no issues.

I've run every diagnostic and memory test I know of. My graphics card simply is not dying. I am certain I will throw this laptop away long before it actually dies. I've run OCCT 4.1 DX10, Windows Mem. Diag., Memtest86+, Prime95, Windows System Health Reports, AMD System Monitor, CPUID Hardware Monitor, and many more that I've simply forgotten about. All show my entire system being in perfect health.

I simply cannot narrow this issue down, so I hope this information triggers something that you've experienced. So far you've been surprisingly helpful. I'm definitely tech savvy and have a good intuition with computers, but this is either some deep rooted issue I cannot pinpoint or it's a variety of issues. Either way, THIS SUCKS haha

That's nice of you. I'm currently dissecting the troublesome 13.9 driver. I managed to get it installed with only 2 of 6 horrible issues. Before I had 6 issues and the computer was just unusable. Now I am trying old techniques to weed out the random system freeze and failures to boot/shutdown.

My gut tells me that this is all a driver malfunction. I did not test it long enough, however I did play ME2 for almost 2 hours without issue with the 13.9 drivers installed. I just played once again for 30 minutes today with the 10.8 drivers and poof, system crash again. I'm at least 99% certain it has nothing to do with overheating nor HDMI port issues. If the driver fails then everything goes black naturally. This would explain why my computer still works and sound still plays fine despite my screen being black. When a "real" system freeze happens at most 5 seconds of music loops, usually only a second and it sounds horrible. But this, the music plays perfectly. I sat there for over a minute last week and the music just kept playing as normal but I could not tell if any of my button presses were doing anything, so it might at least be a partial system freeze.

I'm going to keep testing. I imagine it will take a day to get a feel for if the issues are either unbearable as before or manageable this time around. I do know that with 10.8 drivers my system struggled at 1440x900 for Metro 2033, but with 13.9 I was getting 35-45FPS at 1920x1080p. So it's definitely worth the troubleshooting.

I'll get back with you soon and wish me luck!

I'm afraid I'm simply out of luck. The new drivers did not stop the HDMI black screen issue and even introduced an onslaught of system freezes. I have once again reverted back to the 10.8 drivers. It looks like I'm crap outta luck. I only wish it did not take me months to finally realize this laptop is not worth the time to troubleshoot. Maybe I'll get lucky and find a couple grand lying around and get a new custom desktop sometime.

I'd only buy a new PC if it were a new platform, such as X99 with a 5820k or higher. I bought this laptop for $2800 and aside from the driver inconvenience which started about a year ago, it's been 7 years of max graphics gaming. I'm too spoiled to ever go with a quad core. I had a 2600k@4.1GHz with dual 2GB AMD 6950's and I was unimpressed for the price so I sold it a year ago. Now I sorta wish I didn't but I suppose no money lost, so I'll wait for another break to buy something truly next gen.

$2000 would get me an impressive rig I would put together myself with a 5820k, Cooler Master Nepton 280L cooler, and a Gigabyte G1 Gaming Nvidia 690 plus everything else. I currently use a 1080p Optoma HD141x projector as my monitor, which is blasting on my wall as a 10ft screen. I could never settle for less if it only meant another $500.

Chances are I'll say screw everything and just get a PS4 since PC tech is still so expensive with such little difference. It's obvious Intel, AMD and Nvidia have all hit some serious walls to computer technology, so perhaps I'd just wait another 4-5 years and use this laptop or a cheapy computer til things get more awesomerer