For a while now I have had a problem with my Razer BLade Advanced 15 (mid 2019) screen flashing black for ~1 second every 5-10 minutes. I think I finally figured out the issue with this. I'm surprised Razer hasn't been able to figure it out and fix it, it's pretty obvious once you realize why it's happening. But I thought I'd post here to help out others - AND to report two bugs that should totally be fixable!
Summary: I am pretty sure it's an issue with switching between the onboard Intel graphics and the NVidia GPU. Specifically it happens when the Intel graphics are set to a different refresh rate from the Nvidia graphics (ie 60 vs 240).
I went to the Intel graphics command center, Display menu, Refresh Rate, and set it to 60Hz. Then I went into Razer Synapse, System, Performance, and set Screen Refresh Rate to 60Hz.
Once doing that the problem totalyl stopped for me for the last few days. Previously I was getting a ~1 second flicker/black screen every few minutes depending on what I was doing - usually in desktop while browsing and not games, etc - which makes sense since "semi-idle" or using Edge, etc would be where it's most likely to switch between graphics vs always using the Nvidia GPU in a game.
HOWEVER: it just started happening again. I thought "crap, I didn't actually figure it out" - but then I went back to Synapse and saw it had changed the refresh rate back to 240Hz! (this despite that it is LITERALLY still set to a custom mode I NAMED "60Hz mode" just to be able to quickly switch to it...
So, two bugs:
- it briefly blanks the display when switching between GPUs if they are not the same refresh rate (it should either support this seamlessly or never switch refresh rate on the fly!)
- the refresh rate setting seems to randomly change for no reason (so far seems to be Razer Synapse bug, not Intel), causing it to happen again until they are manually set back to the same value.
Note I have not yet tried setting both to 240Hz as I can't stand the constant fan noise when everything runs locked at 240Hz. (I had tried with panel self refresh on and off, and off seemed better, though I probably didn't test all combinations). This is all pretty annoying even if this is the "fix", since I payed a lot for a gaming laptop that basically can't do more than 60Hz properly...