No signal from video card

[sailor420]

Hi all,

A friend of mine is having some issues with his desktop that we built a couple of years ago. I'll go through what the symptoms have been, and then go through what we've tried.

It started a few months ago when seemingly out of the blue, the monitor stopped receiving input from the machine. The machine was posting, and it seemed to be booting up behind the scenes, but the monitor just gave the "no signal" message and shut off.

Here's what we've tried:

* Resetting CMOS. No dice.
* Reseating all components (vid card, RAM, cables, power, etc). Nothing.
* Switching out the RAM. Nope.
* New video card. Same symptoms.
* Plug monitor into onboard video. Now we get video, and it boots.
* Boot up with monitor plugged into PCI-E video card. Again, nothing. This time, with machine still on (i.e. without rebooting), we unplug from the PCI-E card and plug into the onboard. Now we have a signal.
* Repeat the above with the old video card. Same results
* Make sure the BIOS is set to use the PCI-E card rather than the onboard. It is. More interestingly, it's set to only enable the onboard when it doesn't detect a PCI-E card.



So it seems at this point that it's not a problem with the video card, but rather that the motherboard is for some reason not detecting the video card at all. How could this be happening? Is it possible for the slot to somehow stop working? I'd think that if something like this happened, that there would be other problems with the mobo as well (i.e. not just the PCI-E slot would die, the machine would stop booting, etc).

Any suggestions on what this might be, anything else I could try, or how I meet fix it?

Thanks for the help, folks.

 

[evongugg]

When you boot into windows, do you see the card in device manager?
Tell us about your power supply?
Did you connect the extra power connector if applicable?
Tried a different monitor?

 

[evongugg]

Please list your hardware.

 

[sailor420]

When you boot into windows, do you see the card in device manager?
Tell us about your power supply?
Did you connect the extra power connector if applicable?
Tried a different monitor?

Have not checked device manager, will give that a shot.

There is no power connector on the card itself--this was actually one of my first thoughts, but the card pulls all power from the mobo.

Dont have an extra monitor to test, but we did plug the monitor into a laptop, and the monitor works fine there, so it doesnt appear to be the monitor.

I'll pull together the systems stats and post them shortly.

 

[sailor420]

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M55plus-S3G
Onboard video: NVIDIA GeForce 6100
PSU: Antec earthwatts EA380 380W
RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 533
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3800+
New video card: MSI N9600GT-MD1G GeForce 9600 GT 1GB
Old video card: EVGA 256-P2-N554-AX GeForce 7600GT 256MB

Let me know if there's any other information that anyone needs.

 

[gomi]

That's the same psu that I have and I run a x1950 pro which probably eats up the same amount of power as the 9600gt. I do have some problems though but I have a sneaky suspicion that my card or northbridge is running too hot as both have been known to get pretty hot.

 

[sailor420]

To add to this, the system is now SOMETIMES sending signal through the PCI-E card. Sometimes no signal, other times, it seems to work fine.

Any further insights? This is bizarre.

 

[sailor420]

When you boot into windows, do you see the card in device manager?
Tell us about your power supply?
Did you connect the extra power connector if applicable?
Tried a different monitor?

Just checked, and the card is showing up in the device manager.

We managed to get it to boot once with the new video card in, but after a minute or two the screen turned a solid brown color.

Thoughts? Now it appears that the card is being recognized by the machine in some form or fashion.

 

[evongugg]

If the card is turning brown on you, it is bad.

 

[sailor420]

So, in desperation last night, we started fiddling some more with the settings in the BIOS, and set the motherboard to boot to the (non-existent) PCI (not PCI-E) card first. For some reason, this appears to have made it start working. We've rebooted a few times, and are now consistently getting signal from the PCI-E card.

No idea what voodoo is going on with this machine, but we're going to cross our fingers and hope it continues working.

Thanks for the help all. If it blows up again in the future, I'll be sure to post again.

Thanks!

 

[gomi]

maybe it's a mobo problem. I've had bad experiences with Nvidia based mobos so these days I buy ATI/AMD ones which seem far more stable.