benjaminm580

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Nov 17, 2007
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So I have been experiencing some FPS drop the last day or two while alt tabbing between gaming and websites. Al the sudden today I am gaming and the PC just locks up and I have to power it off. When I power it back on I get nothing but a blank screen. No motherboard page, no post, no loading, no cursor, nothing. I power it off again and back on and I get the MB page but it just sits there indefinitely. So I try again and it's back to the nothing, and is still the same nothing every time I have powered it on since then. I don't even get my start up beep and the light on my monitor stays orange instead of turning blue like it normally does when I power up the PC.

All the fans seem to run just fine during this time, all the motherboard indicator lights seem normal, everything seems to run fine except for the hard drive. The LED light just stays dark and I don't hear any HD activity. So I suspected the HD may be bad. I have only had it for about 9-10 months but it is OEM so I don't think Seagate will honor the warranty, correct? In any case, it's a 400 GB SATA 3.0, but my MB will support an IDE drive and I have a few old ones lying around the house somewhere. Is it worth throwing an IDE in there to see if I can get the PC running or do you think it might not even be the HD?

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.
 

jblock2490

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the video card could have came loose if the monitor isn't receiving any signal. also i remember my mobo screen was not going anywhere at all for a while when i first built my computer, and i believe that that had something to do with the RAM. but with computers i guess it could be anything. im not really sure about the harddrive thing, could be =/
 

benjaminm580

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I wouldn't think it was the video card since the fan on the video card seems to be running just fine. I guess I will try reseating the ram and throwing a different hard drive in there to see if that fixes it.
 

benjaminm580

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Well, it turns out it was one of my 2 GB sticks of G.Skill RAM. After removing the second stick it seems to be just fine. I tried putting that stick in the other slot and it did the same thing it was doing before, but the other stick works fine in that slow so I am going to contact G.Skill and get a replacement stick. Thanks for the reply.
 

Download and run memtest86+ on each stick individually, and both together. It should run with NO errors for a full pass. Also try to run a known good stick in each ram slot to verify that all mobo ram slots are good.

G.skil will ask you to do this before they issue a RMA, so save some time up front.
 

nickhoff

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It may be a silly question but, dual channel and tri-channel ram need to be put in the correct slots, usually the colored slots depending on the motherboard. If it's in the wrong slots Windows won't recognize all the ram and it will be easy to tell. If you read the motherboard manual it will tell you the correct slots to put the ram in. I'm guessing it needs to go in DIMM (A1, and B1)