SER4 Mini Ryzen 7 4800U daily black screens

DesignBee

Hi



I purchased this just three months ago:
Beelink SER4 Mini PC AMD Ryzen 7 4800U 8 Core Windows 11 Pro Mini Office Computer, 32GB RAM + 512GB NVMe SSD, Dual HDMI and USB-C 4K @ 60Hz Output, WiFi 6E, AMD Radeon Graphics



It's an awesome little machine, but I'm having a hard time actually using it. Every day while using programs like Photoshop or Affinity Designer - even Google Chrome - I suddenly get a black, blank screen. The machine seems to be frozen; SHIFT+CTRL+Win+B to restart the gfx driver doesn't work, nothing responds. Have to long press the power button to turn it off.

• The machine is in out-of the box configuration
• I just installed these programs, no drivers, nothing advanced
• AMD driver in system tray says latest version of driver is installed
• I do nothing special up until the blank screen comes, it's not because I'm overloading it or using CPU/GPU much over long time, I almost just opened Photoshop and do small things in the program
• I've run a PC RAM check - no problems detected
  

Long story short, I can't use it for my work or hobby with an issue like this. What can I do? Thanks in advance.


Best regards

Juido

did you check the Temperature? using the amd adrenalin software or other tools like coretemp or hwinfo?
maybe its simple getting to hot?

DesignBee

I'll check but the computer was not put to any use before it happened and as I wrote:

I do nothing special up until the blank screen comes, it's not because I'm overloading it or using CPU/GPU much over long time, I almost just opened Photoshop and do small things in the program.

I guess it is a driver issue - also reported to AMD - my next step is to disable GPU use in all programs that triggered it. Without a fix from any part that just wont help much. I have a Mac Mini M1 that I chose to avoid all the driver issues with GFX cards design programs suffer from in the Windows world, but purchased this Bee for software running only on Windows and boom.

DesignBee

It certainly wasn't because the PC was getting too hot. Monitored the CPU and GPU, never reached abnormal temperatures.

I got the issue again today and pressing these keys several times

How do I reset my drivers black screen?

A quick fix to your black screen problem would be:

press the Windows logo. key+Ctrl+Shift + B

got me back to this:



Never worked before though.

Incans

On a traditional PC these kinds of problems can sometimes be caused by a dodgy power supply. If you have a known good laptop PSU with the right kind of plug fitted, and carefully check the polarity before plugging in(!) you could see if a differnt PSU improves the stability. If that doesn't have any effect it could be driver software, or an internal hardware problem in the SER4 unit itself.

Chudik

DesignBee replied at 2022-08-09 05:46
It certainly wasn't because the PC was getting too hot. Monitored the CPU and GPU, never reached abn ...

Try to change HDMI cable that definitely supports 4K.
I had the same issue, thought it could be the box problem, but recalled the same thing long time ago when FullHD just came in. After changing the cable I did not have black screen issues anymore.  Neither on my working monitor 2560x1440, nor on 4K TV

DesignBee

Hi there

Thank you for your suggestions. I believe the issue was and is the AMD drivers, I enabled beta versions of AMD drivers and I haven't seen this issue for a while now but I believe it is still there. I heard of a couple of other people with AMD drivers getting the exact same error. I always get it when I use graphics programs and I didn't for a while.

When I first posted I believed it was a total frozen machine, but waiting for a while usually gave me the driver timeout error (I always pressed the reset driver shortcut so I do not know for sure if the driver reset itself or it was me). Now that the drivers reports back, takes all blame and I can continue without data loss I am fairly optimistic that it is a driver issue that will be resolved by AMD.

PITA with such drivers issues still in WIndows, though.

Juido

DesignBee replied at 2022-09-03 08:20
Hi there

Thank you for your suggestions. I believe the issue was and is the AMD drivers, I enabled  ...

Im Running AMD Adrenalin Edition Version 22.5.1 and got no black screens so far.
but i got one black screen couple days after i powered the machine for the first time, when windows 11 did install some amd driver to replace the Adrenalin edition.

bob11746

I know it's a little late to post this, but I have the SER4 and have the same issue.  I've also had two 5900HX and now have a 6900HX.  They all had problems from graphics to instant shutdown/lockups.  I had to unplug the power to recover.  Beelink has some fundamental problems.

good luck to everyone.

Clark

I was struggling with this for months, trying different things. Currently I believe I have not only solved the black screen, but I vastly increased the performance.

My black screen issue started after upgrading from 16GB single channel to 64GB dual channel memory. Sometimes it would freeze immediately after logging into windows, sometimes after I open an application, and always when the PC went into sleep mode. I would have to unplug everything just to shut the PC off.

How I solved the problem, I pressed [Delete] during the boot splash screen to enter bios, once inside bios I changed the UMA Frame buffer from 512MB to 2GB. This partitions 2GB of my system ram for the AGP/GPU to use discreetly.

No more timeouts
I can also now run my games at max settings and still get 60fps, which was in the mid 30s before increasing the buffer size, regardless of running dual channel and 4x the ram, gfx just couldn't keep up with only 512MB.