After further testing it turns out I may either have a problem with my power supply, or graphics card. The power supply is about 7 or 8 years old, though it seems to be running fine. Being this is the oldest piece of hardware in my current setup I’ve taken the liberty of purchasing a newer platinum grade power supply (my current one is bronze grade). It should arrive on Friday… hopefully. If the black screens continue after the fact that tells me it was the graphics card…. and as new as it is I really hope it isn’t the cause of my problems. I’d really hate to RMA the damn thing, though I’ve heard ASUS is better about dealing with RMA’s than MSI. Hopefully it’s just the power supply though, unfortunately I don’t have another system to plug my graphics card into. All the other computers in the house are going to either have an older hardware that won’t support my GPU, or they have power supplies that won’t even turn my card halfway on.
Ugh.