The continuing saga of Pun's bad luck with Video Cards.
Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2004 11:18 am
Well, I received my third BFG FX5900 in the mail yesterday. Some of you who have read my other post may already know that I was experiencing strange blue vertical lines at startup and in the windows loading screen, followed by the computer autorebooting after less than a minute in Windows.
This time I went directly to BFG for a replacement, rather than the retailer. So, I removed the drivers through, add/remove programs, went into the device manager and uninstalled the Ti4600 I was using at the time, shut the computer down and did the card swap.
Upon firing up the computer, no blue lines! I was like "Yes! It works! It works!" I proceeded to install the latest Nvidia drivers and rebooted. This time, no blue lines, but nothing else either. just a black screen. The mobo was powered up and all the fans were running, but just a black screen on the display. I am not certian if Windows actually loaded and the card just wasn't sending video signal or the machine was hung. I did notice the HDD activity light was on for a period of time, but I'm not sure if this actually indicates that Windows booted or not.
So, I thought, "hmm, that's strange. Let me try to power the comuter down and do a cold restart." I did that and it worked. I proceeded to tweak the driver settings and also ran D3 and UT2K4. Both ran and looked beautiful.
After about 20 minutes of gaming, I decided to try the warm restart again. Once again, nothing but a black screen. Powered down for a cold restart again and it fired up once again just fine.
I tried a few more times to get the machine to warm restart. After a couple of tries, it wouldnt even start when powered down completely. At that time I yanked the 5900 and put the Ti back in. Worked perfectly.
It seems to me that I wasn't getting the short beep from my mobo on warm restart, but when I powered down the machine and did a cold restart, the mobo would beep. Also, when this happens, the monitor goes active for a short time immediately after restart but then goes into standby.
I'm running a Fortron 420 PSU. There's only one CD drive and one HD in the machine at the moment. No PCI cards are in the machine. I'm running the onblard LAN and Sound on the Abit NF7-S v2.0. So yeah, I feel the 420 watt Fortron should be more than enough.
What could be causing this to happen? Voltage? Another bad card? Some sort of Bios setting? Corrupted Bios? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I'm at my wit's end with this crap.
Thanks!
This time I went directly to BFG for a replacement, rather than the retailer. So, I removed the drivers through, add/remove programs, went into the device manager and uninstalled the Ti4600 I was using at the time, shut the computer down and did the card swap.
Upon firing up the computer, no blue lines! I was like "Yes! It works! It works!" I proceeded to install the latest Nvidia drivers and rebooted. This time, no blue lines, but nothing else either. just a black screen. The mobo was powered up and all the fans were running, but just a black screen on the display. I am not certian if Windows actually loaded and the card just wasn't sending video signal or the machine was hung. I did notice the HDD activity light was on for a period of time, but I'm not sure if this actually indicates that Windows booted or not.
So, I thought, "hmm, that's strange. Let me try to power the comuter down and do a cold restart." I did that and it worked. I proceeded to tweak the driver settings and also ran D3 and UT2K4. Both ran and looked beautiful.
After about 20 minutes of gaming, I decided to try the warm restart again. Once again, nothing but a black screen. Powered down for a cold restart again and it fired up once again just fine.
I tried a few more times to get the machine to warm restart. After a couple of tries, it wouldnt even start when powered down completely. At that time I yanked the 5900 and put the Ti back in. Worked perfectly.
It seems to me that I wasn't getting the short beep from my mobo on warm restart, but when I powered down the machine and did a cold restart, the mobo would beep. Also, when this happens, the monitor goes active for a short time immediately after restart but then goes into standby.
I'm running a Fortron 420 PSU. There's only one CD drive and one HD in the machine at the moment. No PCI cards are in the machine. I'm running the onblard LAN and Sound on the Abit NF7-S v2.0. So yeah, I feel the 420 watt Fortron should be more than enough.
What could be causing this to happen? Voltage? Another bad card? Some sort of Bios setting? Corrupted Bios? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I'm at my wit's end with this crap.
Thanks!