G85SD (LS34DG856SNXZA) + Nvidia RTX 5000 series

[kozad]

I bought my LS34DG856SNXZA in March, and at the time I had a Radeon RX 7900 XTX in my PC. The monitor mostly worked without a fuss. Recently I bought a Nvidia RTX 5090 and sent my 7900 XTX off to Newegg for trade-in credit, and I seem to have found a really weird bug with this monitor.

When the monitor is in Standby mode and I power on my computer tower, there's no display output. The monitor wakes up and just displays a black screen and the usual OSD menus (the purple Gaming Mode menu, etc). I have to unplug the monitor's power and plug it back in to get a picture.

I get the same issue when the PC itself powers off the screen or goes to sleep - the monitor wakes up with a black screen, requiring me to pull the power from the monitor. Not every single time, but enough to be annoying for such a pricey computer monitor + I hate messing with stuff on the rear of the panel because I'm not trying to crack this stupid thing.

I replaced the HDMI and DisplayPort cables - same problem. I tried with a PNY RTX 5060, Zotac RTX 5090,  and now an MSI RTX 5090 - each of these cards has the same issue with this monitor - the monitor is unable to sync correctly when waking up from standby. I did not have this issue with my Radeon card, and I also tested with my CPU's iGPU (motherboard graphics) and my laptop, which has a Radeon 780M iGPU - worked just fine. No issues with the monitor coming out of Standby.

If I use the remote control to power on the monitor *before* I power on the computer, I get a display without issue. But this is a monitor - powering on the computer should just wake up the monitor from Standby without issues. I've owned 6 high end monitors in the past 15 years and this Samsung monitor is the only one to ever be this unreliable.

This happens with DisplayPort and HDMI. No, I have nothing else connected to the GPU or monitor. This is not a driver issue because the display driver does not load until Windows is booting - generic video out should work so you can access BIOS, troubleshoot issues, and whatnot before your OS loads.

Steps I've taken: Use Nvidia's RTX 5060 UEFI firmware tool to update my RTX 5060 - no such update exists for the RTX 5090

DDU + reinstall Nvidia drivers and the monitor driver too

Change DisplayPort and HDMI cables - I even picked up a certified HDMI 2.1 cable to make darn sure the cable would be good.

Turn G-Sync off, turn G-Sync on, set the monitor to 175Hz, set to 120Hz, set to 60Hz.

Manually take the monitor out of Game Mode (it defaults to this for PC connections)

Set the scaling mode to Aspect/GPU in Nvidia control panel.

Ensure the monitor is on the latest firmware (1331.4)

Ensure the latest Nvidia drivers are installed

Factory reset the monitor

I have tried chatting with support, but they seem to just spit out canned answers - "factory reset the monitor. Disable G-Sync. Disable GPU scaling. Reinstall GPU driver" none of which worked and most of which has no bearing on whether or not I get a display output.

@Samsung_Moderator - would it be possible to have someone at Samsung investigate this? 🙏🏼

[meself]

Check Your Motherboard Settings

Update your motherboard BIOS:

Ensure your motherboard's BIOS (or UEFI firmware) is updated to the latest version from your motherboard manufacturer's website. 

Switch to UEFI mode:

If your motherboard supports it, switch from Legacy (CSM) mode to a pure UEFI boot mode. 

Check PCIe settings:

If your motherboard BIOS has the option, manually set the PCIe slot to the correct generation (e.g., PCIe Gen 4) rather than leaving it on "Auto". 

4. Verify Physical Connections 

Check power cables:

Make sure the power cables are securely plugged into your RTX 5060. A lack of sufficient power can cause black screens.

Reseat the GPU:

As a last resort, power off your system, open the case, and reseat the graphics card in its PCIe slot.

[kozad]

My Gigabyte motherboard is running the latest BIOS, just updated it 2 days ago to the late August release.

CMS is disabled.

PCIe x16 is set to Gen 5 - the RTX 5060 is Gen 5 x8

All PCIe power cables are secure.

GPU has been reseated.

This issue is - I shut off my PC and come back later, maybe a couple of hours, maybe overnight, I power the PC on and there's no display on the monitor. The monitor wakes up, it sees a signal, but it won't display the computer's output. Not BIOS splash screen, no Windows boot screen, no Windows desktop. If I unplug the monitor and plug it back in, it just starts working as it should. DisplayPort and HDMI both do this.

This behavior was observed on an RTX 5090 and an RTX 5060. It is not present with AMD GPUs.

Gigabyte Aorus Elite Wifi

Ryzen 7 9800 X3D

64GB G. Skill TridentZ5 Neo 6000

RTX 5060 (temporary)/RTX 5090

1000W EVGA PSU

[Mogay]

btw RX 7900 XTX still a beast with 24GB GDDR6 VRAM lol even 2025 it's plenty (unless AMD stop giving update for your GPU), if you don't switch to Nvidia 5090 you keep enjoying your PC, i think next time just upgrade to newer AMD GPU and don't switch

[kozad]

The 7900 XTX is a good GPU, but some of the games I play need more raw power under the hood for those glorious Ultra settings at 1440 ultrawide. I def regret upgrading, but I'm glad I did in a way because otherwise I might had sold this monitor to someone with an Nvidia GPU at some point in the future and they'd have accused me of selling them a broken monitor.

[kozad]

Here's a review I wrote about this monitor on Amazon, since Samsung won't actually post my review on the monitor's page (I search high and low - it's just not there!)

I bought this in March of 2025, and I was using it was a Radeon 7900 XTX graphics card in my PC. I recently upgraded to an Nvidia RTX 5090 because the 7900 XTX was struggling to run a couple of newer games at this ultrawide resolution with ultra settings. After installing the RTX 5090, I learned that this monitor has issues syncing with the output from the GPU.

If the monitor is in Standby when I power on my tower, the monitor wakes up but will not display output. No BIOS screen, no boot screen, no Windows desktop. Just a black screen. This isn't an Nvidia driver issue, it's a monitor firmware issue. The PC is running fine, Windows loads up without issue, you just can't see anything. If I use the remote to power on the display before I power on my computer, the output from the PC works as expected. Tested with a Zotac RTX 5090, MSI RTX 5090, and a PNY RTX 5060 - each has the same problem. If I forget to power on the monitor with the remote, I have to unplug the monitor's power cable and plug it back in to get display output. Annoying!

I contacted Samsung's customer support and posted to their forums too, but haven't received any advice more helpful than "factory reset the monitor and waste a hour of your life re-logging into everything" - which did nothing for the weird Nvidia syncing bug, but it did discourage me from using the smart tv functionality because I don't want to log into everything again.

Additional testing was done with the Radeon iGPU on my 9800X3D (motherboard graphics as most folks call it) and a laptop with a Radeon 780M iGPU, and they do not exhibit this weird behavior, so if you are using an AMD graphics card, the monitor will behave as expected. I cannot speak for Intel graphics, but I'd assume it works fine. It also works as expected when connected to an M4 iPad Pro, so I'd guess it works fine for Macs too.

On to the monitor itself - while I like having smart TV functionality for video streaming services (none of the video services I know of offer 4k/HDR on a PC due to piracy fears), the UI is just aggressively in the way. When the monitor wakes up, there's a large on screen "Gaming Mode" menu which appear and take several seconds to close. There is also a repeating tutorial/reminder popup about the remote control, which is annoying after the first the few times of seeing it. There is no way to disable these popups, nor the smart tv functionality. So, if you do not need a smart TV for watching Prime etc. in HDR, skip this monitor and get one of the models without the smart tv software installed.

Insofar as the quality of the display - Yes. It's great, I love the display. VRR has issues if you enable it on the Windows desktop via the Windows settings, so leave that off and just enable it in your graphics driver (Freesync/G-Sync) so full screen games can utilize it. HDR also has issues on the Windows desktop + leaving HDR on all the time for non-games is awful for the OLED - leave it off until you're gonna fire up a game.

The curve on this monitor is not aggressive, which is one of the reasons I picked it. I was worried it would bother me to have a curved screen, but after a few hours of using it, I stopped noticing it.

Overall, I like the monitor, but I think it's bizarre that it just doesn't work as a monitor should while connected to an Nvidia GPU, and there should absolutely be an option in the settings to disable OSD popups unless you trigger them with the remote or the joystick on the rear of the display. 99% of people will only ever use this as a computer monitor, so the popups just get in the way and make users wait for them to close so they can use their PC.

If you are looking for an affordable OLED from a reputable brand and have an AMD graphics card, this is a great buy.

[kozad]

I guess Samsung's support team is just gonna leave me hanging. Well, I will take that into consideration when buying my next monitor or television.