Seriously Black Screen of death

I am so sick of trying to figure out what exactly is causing PoE to black screen and crash. I have looked all over the internet to try and find SOMEONE that knows what is going on here. No one has an answer to this problem. When I play PoE, I either get the black screen about 15 minutes into play or anywhere from 1-8 hours of playing. Sometimes I'm lucky and it doesn't crash at all. There is no sound glich loop thing going on. Just the black screen. It's not the video card over heating. I left my window open at night when it in the low 40s. My room was freezing cold and I also have a fan almost right on top of it and it still does black screen. I've tried using new and old drivers. I've tried using compatibility modes, windowed, full screen window. Turning down ALL the video settings for the game and video card. I've removed everything from my computer and cleaned it all out. I've tried switching hard drives. I've tried leaving the computer off for several hours and then trying to play. None of my other games do this. NOT ONE!!!! And the worst part about this is the only way for me to shut down my computer is the power switch on the back. Someone please help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't honestly know how much having a cold room etc is going to help if it would be a hardware related overheating issue, because if your fan is having problems keeping a stable RPM, the chip is going to heat up and the heat won't disappear fast enough because there isn't the thing that needs to be moving the heat out. It will only make it crash less frequently, I used to have a rig that ran way too hot but it was rarely an issue because my indoor temperatures were manageable to live in mostly beacuse the computer was providing with so much heat, lol (I had +10 C in the mornings inside, good times).

You'll want to check your temperatures and fan keeping up with speed under heavy use with something like MSI afterburner (I think it does that).
Chip -> thermal paste -> something that conducts heat -> fan that pushes in cool air for the heat to dissipate from the thing that conducts heat (or the other way around). This, me not being a physics tech expert trying to explain, is the thing that moves out the heat from the chip. If something in this chain fails, you will most likely always end up with some residual heat gathering because the heat will not be conducted out as efficciently as it would be needed to for the gods of thermodynamics to be happy.
Not saying it's the problem you're having, but you shouldn't rule out overheating until you've checked the actual temperatures and fan rotation keeping up to speed. Can be worth checking that the GPU fan/s hasn't gotten loose (probably only worth concidering if your card is from the stone age tho), it has to sit tightly where it's sitting.
Issue with overheating could also be caused by PSU being too weak or dying out (and not feeding enough juice for fan).

Your issues could also be caused by faulty RAM, you should run a memtest to see if there are any irregularities. Would however assume that RAM issues would cause issues in other games aswell.

Have you overclocked your GPU? If you have, lower your clock speed and voltages back to factory settings.
If it's a GPU related issue and you aren't a stranger with how underclocking/overclocking works in the case of not having overclocked your card, you could try with slightly underclocking and if that doesn't help, then slightly overclocking your card, it's not unheard of that there could be an issue with individual game stability caused by the clock speed/voltages even if it would be sitting on factory settings.

Good luck.

I get the black screen also.

My setup... ASUS Rampage Extreme 1V MB, I7 4960x, 32GB memory, 3 - GTX Titans (Watercooled and never gets above 35C)

I did the following...

Disabled Realtek audio.
Disabled Nvidia Audio on each card

Still crashed to black screen. (Sound still active so it seems like a video driver crash) Checked debug logs no indication of crash. Only error is the POWER reset I do to reboot the PC.


Disable SLI... No crash.


Interesting issue but I can at least get around it.

Is there a trace/debug switch I can run to capture logging info to see if I can get to the root of the issue?

Thanks

had this on my old gtx570 which was overclocked by the manufacturer. turned out the manufacturer had set the defalut voltage in the card's bios too low which stressed the card alot but it still worked for 2 years until a certain nvidia driver came out. it then started to behave weird, i think poe just finished the job with it's complex graphics.
it would black screen while playing with the sound in the background, the driver would crash (restart) from time to time, i could relieve the situation by using only one display and increasing he cards voltage with afterburner after which it went better but only for 1-2 months. then the card would stop working at boot time randomly and i had to exchange it. no problems since.