About 2 days ago I came back to my computer after exactly 1 month away. Thought I’d see if overclocking Nvidia on Cachy would finally work for me. Did -Syu. Restart recommended. Restarted. Got to the bootloader page or whatever it’s called after the gigabyte bios logo. Black screen. Zero response. I didn’t really have anything to lose cuz it was a new build so I tried starting over.
So I pulled out my CachyOS bootable. I am able to boot from USB. This version still said “only for newer cards (9xx)” on the closed Nvidia driver option. It was the version I used to install Cachy a couple months ago. Tried installing Cachy. Same black screen when booting from SSD. Then I somehow got a fresher version of the CachyOS and made it bootable on the same USB stick, from the environment I can get to by booting from USB. Now it says “only for newer cards (20xx)” for the closed driver version when installing. Now I can’t even figure out how to make a bootable USB from the USB booted environment. It’s like the new version stopped coming with a 7zip alternative. Can’t do anything with the .tar.gz, don’t even know how I did it the first time.
But anyways I tried doing fresh installs, choosing the wipe drive option, using all sorts of combinations of options. I tried GNOME/KDE, default/closed(20xx or newer) drivers, and grub/default/Refind. It all ended the same when booting from SSD; the furthest I got was that boot loader screen and the normal text you see right after it that basically just lists the kernel version. Then a black screen.
I saw one or two solutions but they seemed to involve sketchy security bypasses! Not really a fan of that! And I only even really want to stay with Cachy if it can f***ing overclock my GPU. I tried so many different routes last time and nothing worked. I thought maybe the new Nvidia drivers would make a difference but now I can’t even get in. I get massively improved networking hiccups in my favorite game rn by using cachy kernels over windows, plus I get VRR, but it’s barely worth it when I lose out on so many frames by having my GPU run at native voltages and clocks. It’s a 14600k Intel CPU and an RTX 3080. Oh yeah and going back to windows with my backup USB worked flawlessly, for that dude in a comment here left for someone probably going through the same thing suggesting that it’s a hardware issue, and my card also seems to have gotten some free performance even on the windows side of things with the new drivers. Still trash netcode in that game on windows tho.