Hey everyone,
It's been a while since I've worked with computers, so forgive me for anything that may be incorrect. I'm currently very far away from my desktop in question, but I want to ask you, the community, about an issue that I was trying to diagnose with my graphics card before I left for college.
I started off with a XFX Radeon 6850. It was a pretty sweet card, but unfortunately the fan died. It was a few years after I purchased it, so a warranty was out of the question. As a naive teenager who was obsessed with cooling, this practically warranted a purchase of an aftermarket GPU cooler - something that I, at the time, was looking very deeply into, though I was always scared of "frying my card" or something along those lines.
I picked up an ARCTIC Accelero S1 VGA cooler, which was basically a giant heatsink, and got it onto my card. I put a few 120 mm fans on it for super cooling power, and although I had to support the card using zip-ties so that it wouldn't break off from it's PCIE slot due to its sheer weight, it was pretty awesome.
the issue
I left for college, and came back around 8 months later. I tried to start up my machine with the aftermarket GPU, and although everything seemed to be running pretty well, there was no startup screen on my monitor - my monitor was just black.
I dropped in another graphics card, and somewhat unfortunately, I got a picture going on my screen. I repeated this inserting/removing process of the two graphics cards, ensuring that I didn't, for some reason, miss something, such as inserting some power cables or something. Still no picture from the 6850.
tl;dr
I turned on my computer that hasn't been used in several months. The XFX 6850 (out of warranty) with aftermarket cooling didn't seem to send a video signal to monitor, another card did. What do I do next? I'd rather not scrap the card, and if I can fix it somehow, then that'd be great.
It's been a while since I've worked with computers, so forgive me for anything that may be incorrect. I'm currently very far away from my desktop in question, but I want to ask you, the community, about an issue that I was trying to diagnose with my graphics card before I left for college.
I started off with a XFX Radeon 6850. It was a pretty sweet card, but unfortunately the fan died. It was a few years after I purchased it, so a warranty was out of the question. As a naive teenager who was obsessed with cooling, this practically warranted a purchase of an aftermarket GPU cooler - something that I, at the time, was looking very deeply into, though I was always scared of "frying my card" or something along those lines.
I picked up an ARCTIC Accelero S1 VGA cooler, which was basically a giant heatsink, and got it onto my card. I put a few 120 mm fans on it for super cooling power, and although I had to support the card using zip-ties so that it wouldn't break off from it's PCIE slot due to its sheer weight, it was pretty awesome.
the issue
I left for college, and came back around 8 months later. I tried to start up my machine with the aftermarket GPU, and although everything seemed to be running pretty well, there was no startup screen on my monitor - my monitor was just black.
I dropped in another graphics card, and somewhat unfortunately, I got a picture going on my screen. I repeated this inserting/removing process of the two graphics cards, ensuring that I didn't, for some reason, miss something, such as inserting some power cables or something. Still no picture from the 6850.
tl;dr
I turned on my computer that hasn't been used in several months. The XFX 6850 (out of warranty) with aftermarket cooling didn't seem to send a video signal to monitor, another card did. What do I do next? I'd rather not scrap the card, and if I can fix it somehow, then that'd be great.