About 4 days ago I installed a new power supply and graphics card into my computer. Initially it ran completely fine.
However, just today, after start up a series of events happened like this:
Other notes:
However, just today, after start up a series of events happened like this:
■Start up computer, boots up fine. I log in, wait for programs to start up, and walk off while I wait for Google Chrome to open.
■Come back, and my computer screen has gone entirely white - No sign of a mouse cursor or any standard windows. Ctrl Alt Delete doesn't work, and I can hear my graphics card's fan going at high speeds. I force my computer to turn off by holding the power button.
■Restart computer. Garbled, multicolor, horizontal lines appear on the startup screen, and I decide it's best to turn it off at that point.
Other notes:
■ Components of interest here: The computer I'm starting from is a Dell studio XPS desktop 435mt (bought in 2009) - Hard drive, motherboard, and all other hardware is based off of that model. The only two things I replaced are the power supply: An Antec BP500U, and the graphics card: A Radeon HD 7950 Gigabyte (used, but like new, from Amazon).
■ Because of the power supply, there are a lot of stray cables laying about inside the tower. At least two of them make some limited contact with the top and sides of the graphics card.
■ I actually booted in safe mode between the two standard runs. Safe mode started up without any seeming incident (no garbled horizontal lines), though the startup screen's gradients looked more blocky than normal - on my second standard startup, the colors looked sort of similar. When actually running more programs in safe mode, I discover that colored areas of the screen have regularly spaced horizontal discolored bands across them.
■ One cable connecting the power supply to the mother board is a bit further out from the plug than should be (The 24 prong connector - I was able to get the 20 plug from the power supply in, but the +4 plug seems less secured.)
■ Graphics card drivers are up to date. However, I didn't check to see if there were any other software requirements for motherboard/power supply changes.
■ I turned down the GPU and Memory clock speeds of the card - at factory settings, some screen 'jumping' occured when switching between 2D and 3D programs, as well as sometimes when loading took place. Going down to 500Ghz GPU and 750Ghz Memory speeds seemed to alleviate that. This is a reduce in clock speeds, so if anything, less stress is being put on the card than usual.
■ Speed of some seemingly processor-related actions (loading a webpage, program, or starting up, for example) seem to take a bit longer after installing the new hardware.
■ At least one game I run seems to raise the computer's temperature a bit higher than average - seemingly capping out around 60C at some points. I've done some research on the topic of maximal temperature for the 7950, and it seems to be around 75C.
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