AW3423DWF, black screen solution

I am posting this with the hope that future users of the AW3423DWF who are experiencing random black screens or blackouts see this solution which they may not have tried.

TL;DR: Try plugging your machine and monitor into completely seperate electrical power outlets.

I started experiencing random black screens in my games and thought I had tried every possible method of troubleshooting, including:

• monitor has latest firmware installed
• Nvidia GPU has latest driver installed
• reverting to old drivers that used to work
• using a brand new HDMI cable
• doing a factory reset of the monitor
• disabled auto input source and set it to HDMI only
• different HDR profiles
• turning off HDR in the OSD
• disabling VRR
• disabling any overlays (Steam, Discord, Nvidia)
• switching between full screen and borderless windowed
• running at 1080p
• capping at 60Hz
• run monitor self-diagnostic test with no issues

Nothing worked. I was using HDMI and could not test DP since my gaming laptop does not have the necessary port. One interesting detail to note was how the OSD became inoperable during the blackout, in that I could not open the OSD, and the blackout would cause the OSD to disappear if it was open at the time of the blackout. This led me to believe that the issue was not with my GPU or HDMI cable, as nothing was indicating an actual loss of signal from my laptop.

After a whole day of troubleshooting and thinking I would have to resort to RMA, I hauled everything over to my brother's place to test his monitor on my laptop and my monitor on his desktop. We didn't even get that far - simply plugging up to his power outlets seemed to resolve the issue.

This will not necessarily solve the issue for you if you are experiencing this problem. But if you have tried everything and nothing has worked, this may just be the solution for you. 🤞