Brown out, no screen

[tim_ver]

My computer about a week ago was fine then had a weird surge and monitor went off I was on a surge protector. And now when I boot up no display. I tried new monitor and video card but no luck ideas?

Thanks

 

[aziraphale]

What exactly happens? Spinning fans? Starting HD's? Beeping codes? You'll have to be a little more specific. From your description it could be anything...

 

[tim_ver]

comes on. No beeps, hdd seems to spin. I also disconnected all cables and devices to see if it would just come up to the bios, no luck.

 

[Dahak]

Check your powersupply first.Exchange it with another one you know works and see if that helps at all.If not,you might be looking at a damaged mother board.Also try resetting your cmos.If none of this helps,then very closely examine your motherboard.Pay special attention to the capacitors,look to see if any are puffed out or split,if you find even one like that,you need to RMA your board or buy a new one.Goodluck.

Dahak

AMD X2 5600+ @ 2.8ghz(stock)
M2N32-SLI DELUXE MB
2 GIGS DDR2 800 RAM
THERMALTAKE 850WATT PSU
7950GT KO(WAITING FOR MY OTHER TO COME BACK FROM RMA)
ACER 22IN. LCD
SMILIDON RAIDMAX GAMING CASE
80GIG/250gig SATA2 HD's
XP MCE

 

[jonisginger]

Yeh, swap out PSU, if when replaced, your having funny errors, you might have corrupt HDD or fuxx0red motherboard etc.

 

[croc]

I'm confused... Your topic title talks about a 'brown out' event, then your first sentence talks about a 'surge' So which is it?

OK, might have well been both. Let's say that a creature (a fox bat) got across your mains. For the duration of the time it takes your mains to fry the poor sucker, you'd have 'brown' power. ie, All of the mains AC would sag , thus your wall socket would get (say) 10% or so less voltage. Your surge protector has no fill-in capability, so now your PSU is under-powered, but still requires the same watts output so P+I*E takes over... 'E' went down, so to maintain 'P' 'I' HAS to go up. Thus overloading your psu. If it is a good PSU it might take the load....

Then the poor creature that caused the event is fried free of the mains. Suddenly, your wall socket is now hit with a surge of voltage and again most likely your surge suppressor can't handle that kind of transition. And now your PSU has to react.

In order to keep this from becoming a tome on AC mains, surge protectors (unless very good / expensive ones) won't protect you from surges. And the very expensive ones won't cover you from brown outs for longer than their caps can store a supply, typically milliseconds.

I'd guess that your PSU is fried, and also possibly your GPU. You might also expect your memory to show degraded performance in the near future, as well as possibly your MB...

A decent UPS can be worth a lot.

 

[4Ryan6]

A decent UPS can be worth a lot.

I agree with Croc, this may be like rubbing salt on the wound but an Uninteruptable Power Supply would have saved you this trouble, they protect against Brown Outs, Power Surges, Power Outage, Etc., so maybe there should be one in your future plans.

 

[tim_ver]

Ok I got a new power supply 400w and still no video The mother board lights come on no beeps or sounds though. Aarghhhh, this is frustrating.

Ideas?

Oh, also got a new APC for it now.

 

[The_Prophecy]

Ok I got a new power supply 400w and still no video The mother board lights come on no beeps or sounds though. Aarghhhh, this is frustrating.

Ideas?

Oh, also got a new APC for it now.

The power events may have screwed with the ram as well. Remove all ram sticks present in the system and reconnect them one by one. Remove all sticks and turn the system on. See if the BIOS complains about no ram being present. If it does, reconnect each stick one by one, turning the comp on each time you hook up a stick until the system stops POST'ing when you turn it on. Once it stops POST'ing, you've found your bad ram stick. If the system still doesn't POST with no ram sticks present, you're most likely looking at a dead mobo. Try removing all other components first though to make sure (i.e. Video card, all hard drives and optical drives, ram, expansion cards... everything minus the CPU of course).

 

[orangegator]

Try clearing the CMOS to reset the bios.