Hi all,
so here's the deal: Radeon 6950 HD and a Corsair 850W PSU. System is a couple of years old, works great. While gaming, suddenly I get a black screen with sound working for a few seconds (requires a hard restart) or I get black w/ gray vertical stripes (hard restart required). No error codes (of course).
I throw in 2 8800 GTs (SLI) and play some games. Works fine all night, but at one point I got a black screen with a mouse cursor frozen on it and sound continued (and apparently the keyboard as I was on a push-to-talk). Game disconnected while I was stuck in this purgatory. I rebooted, Windows went to safe mode and threw a BSOD, rebooted again, windows loaded fine and finished the game with no problems. No error code, yet again.
Bear with me, plz. So the problem is that these issues are similar, but not identical.
1) The Radeon card failed and the Nvidia cards (or driver) simply crashed, unrelated.
2) The PSU is faulty on the 12v rails.
HWinfo shows all voltages normal and steady as a rock. I cannot tell the 12v vid card plugs, it doesn't report that one. With the Radeon in, I ran a Benchmark test and it crashed instantly, but later it ran the entire test without problem. With the older Nvidia cards in, I ran a Prime95 test that maxed out the computer for a while and no problems.
So my thoughts are either the 12v vid card rails are failing somehow or I have a bad Radeon card (and a crash on the Nvidia cards).
Any ideas how to test more? I don't have a voltmeter
The radeon card seemed to be crashing more and more with use, implying a heat related issue. Took apart and cleaned, reapplied Arctic silver. Ran steady for an hour then started crashing repeatedly.
I'd appreciate some advice. I do expect a lot of "Buy a new PSU!", but those aren't cheap. I need to figure out which item needs replacing and put the money there, not buy a new PSU and find out the Radeon is bad, so spending more $.
so here's the deal: Radeon 6950 HD and a Corsair 850W PSU. System is a couple of years old, works great. While gaming, suddenly I get a black screen with sound working for a few seconds (requires a hard restart) or I get black w/ gray vertical stripes (hard restart required). No error codes (of course).
I throw in 2 8800 GTs (SLI) and play some games. Works fine all night, but at one point I got a black screen with a mouse cursor frozen on it and sound continued (and apparently the keyboard as I was on a push-to-talk). Game disconnected while I was stuck in this purgatory. I rebooted, Windows went to safe mode and threw a BSOD, rebooted again, windows loaded fine and finished the game with no problems. No error code, yet again.
Bear with me, plz. So the problem is that these issues are similar, but not identical.
1) The Radeon card failed and the Nvidia cards (or driver) simply crashed, unrelated.
2) The PSU is faulty on the 12v rails.
HWinfo shows all voltages normal and steady as a rock. I cannot tell the 12v vid card plugs, it doesn't report that one. With the Radeon in, I ran a Benchmark test and it crashed instantly, but later it ran the entire test without problem. With the older Nvidia cards in, I ran a Prime95 test that maxed out the computer for a while and no problems.
So my thoughts are either the 12v vid card rails are failing somehow or I have a bad Radeon card (and a crash on the Nvidia cards).
Any ideas how to test more? I don't have a voltmeter
The radeon card seemed to be crashing more and more with use, implying a heat related issue. Took apart and cleaned, reapplied Arctic silver. Ran steady for an hour then started crashing repeatedly.
I'd appreciate some advice. I do expect a lot of "Buy a new PSU!", but those aren't cheap. I need to figure out which item needs replacing and put the money there, not buy a new PSU and find out the Radeon is bad, so spending more $.
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