Pulling my hair out over graphics card

[chellebell]

hi all,
first things first, specs.....
AMD X2 5200+ CPU
M2N-E SLI Mobo
2GIG DDR800
Evo labs 700w Psu
200gig 7200rpm barracuda hard drive
BFG 320MB 8800 GTS OC

this problem has had me ripping out my hair in clumps. its regarding the gfx card.....
it will run for a short time and then randomly i get a black screen, i am left with no choice but to hard reboot, upon which i just get a strange clicking sound from the hard drive (possibly) after maybe a few attempts it will boot fine, other times it wont boot at all. i would like to tell you what i have tried...
i went from a hiper 425w psu to the 700w....no joy.
i have ran every test under the sun on memory and cpu along with temp monitoring, all ok.
i changed the hard drive from a 60gig to the 200gig.....no joy.
i have tried loads of drivers for the mobo, gfx card and made sure the bios is up to date....no joy.
i even took the card to a PC technician who tested the card using a diagnostic program and it passed all tests :s :s

doing some tiresome net trolling i have seen many different theories from the card being incompatable with motherboards, to that particular brand of card having a known memory leak. i have also read that there is a problem with PCI 1.1 - PCI 2.0 not sure what this means?
The sad thing is that when it does run (for the short time) its a brilliant card and i really want it to work.

i would really really like some advice on what could be wrong, i have exhausted all obvious possibilities and now i need some in depth help.
thanks in advance.

 

[mactronix]

Well it is quite an old card and the possability that its just on its last legs is a real one im afraid. I had a card do this before, i think it was transistors crapping out in the end.
You say you tested lats of stuff Temps etc and that it pased a tech test. that dosent leave a lot to be honest. It dosent come as a surprise that it could pass a tech test and show no problems. you said yourself that when it does go its fine.
Sorry i couldnt be of any usefull help

Mactronix

 

[KidHorn]

If I understand you correctly, you switched hard drives and switched PSUs and it didn't solve your problem. That leaves your video card, ram or motherboard. I would guess the problem is with your video card since they have a higher failure rate than the others and the problem is in the video. If you had another video card to test with, that would help troubleshoot. If not, maybe you should consider getting a new card. 8800 is good, but it's somewhat dated and newer cards are much better.

 

[ordos96]

I used to have a similar problem here what OS are you running? and is it a 32 or 64 bit version? My bfg 8800 GTS OC would run 32-bit OS's jsut fine. But when i went to a 64-bit OS it would give me that black screen or even a BSOD. I wanted to stick with Windows 7 and since i have 6 gig of RAM in my PC i needed to use the 64-bit version. I was able to narrow down the problem to only occuring when i ran a full screen application such as games. I tried a wide variety of drivers from for the card none of them seemed to work. I ended up haveing to get a new card, so i ended up getting two 5770s as i could not find any 5850s in stock and i couldn't wait weeks or months for them to get in. Your best bet is going to be to get a new card.

Also were there any new installs on your system when this happened? new programs or hardware? anything at all that changed when your system started to do this? Mine was just form upgrading the OS to 64-bit.