U3011, DP Sleep Issues (See Image)

Question

Well I thought this was fixed by updating my monitor drivers to Dell's original drivers 1.0.0.0 Dell Inc. circa 6/1/2010 from Dell (otherwise was using Microsoft's generic U3011 drivers before then), but that was really just a temporal improvement as the same and recurrent problem has reared its ugly head on my Dell U3011 Rev A05 and R9 280X AMD cards with latest 14.7 (and many prior) drivers.  I spent the last 2 years with the monitor dealing with a dual-link DVI connection that doesn't wake from sleep; so I recently switched to Display Port and was happy to see that it always woke from sleep, but then noticed that it does not GO to sleep.   Often it powers down correctly, but more often than not, it 'sleeps' into a black screen with the backlight still on, and artifacts on the screen (see image).  I thought that this was a faulty displayport cable so I ended up buying a new one and upgrading to a premium certified cable, but I have the same issue.  Display turns off to a blank screen when windows tells the display to go to sleep (set to 1 min for testing purposes - note that the system is not otherwise asleep) and I get the same results. As this is under a 5 year extended warranty from Dell ending 2017, I talked to support this evening and they are going to exchange a refurb replacement (although I heard recently that Dell's been shipping U3014's as replacements... not that this is a good thing since I've heard bad things about that model too).  Looking at old threads  this seems to have happened extensively with the U2711 models as well.  Dell is there a known fix to this as I had no luck talking anything technical with phone support (they didn't even know what a displayport was and was trying to figure out if I was connecting by DVI or HDMI). Anyone from Dell care to comment on this technical issue here?  It seems to plague the 2711 and 3011 series and I'm wondering if there is a hardware issue that is on the level of recall potential on these models.  For a $1000 pro model, I'm disappointed at the lack of transparency Dell has had on the specific issue, or addressing this over the last few years.

DELL-Chris M · Answer

There is no recall. All you can do is continue to get exchanges while under warranty. Did you test the monitor on a different video card? You mentioned 'cards', did you test the monitor on all available video cards DP? If in CrossFireX, remove one of the video cards from the system. Test each video card and all of its DP one at a time in a single video card setup.

lolalex · Answer

Anyone else interested in this may like to know that after extensive testing with my unit, I found this monitor seems to Sleep/Wake without problems on a dual link DVI connection but will always encounter the problems stated above (randomly artefacting/not sleeping) when you are using a DisplayPort connection.

My Fix: I disabled windows standby for the monitor and wrote my own standby algorithm program that constantly forces the monitor off but randomly turns it back on and off rapidly, so quickly that the monitor never has time to come out of standby but if it has failed to go into standby then this is enough to trigger it to go into standby.

Only issue with my fix is that when the PC is off my script is running so it can still happen.

bardcom · Answer

Thanks lolalex, this issue was starting to drive me demented. I've ended up ditching the DisplayPort connection and gone back to the DL_DVI instead and everything is now working correctly. It would be nice if Dell took the time to understand and fix this problem.

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