I actually think I found an answer to this. That was surprisingly fast considering the number of dead ends I saw on forums. User nixda on a different question, Turning DisplayPort monitor off disables monitor completely, says:
Disable the "DisplayData Channel Command Interface" (DDC/CI) in your
monitor settings.
For my Asus LED monitor this meant going to the monitors settings menu (using the physical button on the monitor) -> System Settings -> OSD Setup -> DDC/CI and turning it off.
Seems to be working so far will update if that changes.
EDIT
I thought the above solved it because when the monitor went to sleep (power light changed from blue to orange) I could quickly wake it up without issue. However if the monitor stayed sleeping longer (say 1 minute+) then it would not wake up. I now don't think the above step is necessary.
I found a post on a dell forum which led me to the solution:
This is a video card, video card driver, or operating system power
management issue. The monitor DP (DisplayPort) is passive. It simply
waits for the signal from the video card to awake. By powering the
monitor off/on, you are forcing the operating system and/or video card
to reinitiate the DP handshake. The Radeon HD 7790 has eight power
management states through its PowerTune technology. My guess is
somewhere in that software is the ability to tell it to adjust what
the card is doing as far as power management. (source:
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/desktop/f/3515/t/19520244
)
Elsewhere in that thread is mention of the TriXX Tweak Utility (direct link) from Sapphire Technology (the maker of my video card). This has a setting Disable ULPS
(ULPS = Ultra Low Power State). I installed that utility and checked the Disable ULPS
setting and sure enough when my monitor went to sleep I could now wake it back up. Success! Well sort of, when I restarted my computer the problem returned and opening the TriXX Utility I could see that the Disable ULPS
checkbox was unchecked. As far as I can tell the TriXX utility has no way to make that setting stick between reboots (I might be wrong about this).
Digging further I found several forums discussing disabling ULPS (mostly in the context of working out crossfire issues, e.g.: How to disable ULPS). In those forums the procedure they recommend is searching the entire registry for EnableUlps
and changing the value of each occurrence from 1 to 0 (in fact you will see several minor variations on the exact procedure but this is the gist of it).
For me in particular I needed to change the following keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\amdkmdag -> EnableUlps
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\services\amdkmdag -> EnableUlps
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\services\amdkmdag -> EnableUlps
(The EnableUlps
setting appeared elsewhere but was already set to 0. Also there's another setting EnableUlps_NA
which I did not touch)
If you're like me you'll be reluctant to change the registry to fix a problem that seems like it should have a readily available solution. But as you dig around I think you'll find that ready solutions don't currently exist (and it beats modifying the DisplayPort cable with electrical tape which is an oft suggested solution)
I made the registry tweaks and now it seems to be working properly even after restarting.
Note: people say you will need to redo the registry tweaks every time you update your video drivers.
Best Answer
By sleep, do you mean the hard drive goes to sleep, or the monitors go to sleep?
Couple things I would check. I would turn the secondary monitor off by the power button and see if the same thing happens. If the issue doesn't persist. That would mean that Windows 10 has a setting where it turns off all the monitors to conserve power (keep in mind windows 10 was also designed for tablets as well).
You could also change the power settings from power saver to balanced or create your own power settings. (Bear in mind this may or may not work depending on if your IT allows you access to these settings).