Hello Community,
I recently bought and built myself a new rig (specs below). Unfortunately it has been running into some problems. Originally it had the Sapphire Radeon 5870 card in it and it was running fantastically. However, one day out of the blue, my screen went black during gameplay and i heard the sound freezing at exactly the same time. I thought perhaps it was a glitch in the game (DiRT 2) but once i restarted the same glitch happened again only much sooner during gameplay.
I decided to just ignore it and stop playing the game but then it started happening even while the machine was idle on the desktop. Every time i booted up the time until it crashed with a black screen got shorter and shorter until one day it didn't even show the bios screen any more but just stayed black and i could hear my ATI card blowing its fan at 100%. I tried updating the bios, reinstalling windows 7, memtest was clear (3 passes made), checked the voltages and current on the psu which were all in the normal range. So i decided to just take out the card and use the internal one while i needed to do some work. This worked without a problem, has been stable since i started using it about 1 month ago.
So... I have RMA'd the graphx card cause i really can't think of any other reason for the problem, and i am still waiting for it to come back. In the meantime i have tried building in an older Nvidia card (GeForce 8800 GTS) which was working well... that is, until about a week after installation the first black screen hit (however the sound in the background was still working and the computer seemed to be ok just i couldn't see what i was doing). So i restart and within quick succession i was back to square one with a black screen during boot. So i take out the graphics card, start up the computer, go into the bios and set it to use the internal graphics card on boot and then put the Nvidia card back in and launched windows 7. Now in the device manager there is no reference of the Nvidia card and i cant get it to identify it. The funny thing is that this card works flawlessly on another rig.
One more piece of info, the cards both work alright if there is no driver installed at all, so i guess it would be "safe mode" in normal terms. I would appreciate any input to the matter... whether i could start checking software issues or if anyone has heard of this problem before. I really hope this isn't something to do with my mobo as its a pain in the ass to RMA that and rebuild everything.
Computer Specs:
AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition C3, 3.4GHz
Kingston HyperX, 4x2GB, DDR3-1333, CL9-9-9-24@1.6V
Antec Case Performance One P183
Antec CP 850 Watt 80plus, SLI Ready, RoHS
Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.2
Gigabyte GA-MA785GT-UD3H, AMD 785G, AM3, HDMI Motherboard
ATI Radeon HD 4200 internal graphics card
D-Link DWA-547 Wireless PCI-Adapter bis 300 Mbit/s
Sapphire HD 5870 1GB, PCI-E x16 2.0, DP, HDMI (RMA'd)
Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS
Intel X25-M G2 80GB, SATA-II, 2,5" (Windows Installed Here!)
Western Digital Caviar Blue, 7200rpm, 16MB, 500Gb HDD
P.S. I tried using many different versions of the graphics drivers for both cards but nothing helped. Running no drivers at all allowed me to at least boot and get into the desktop without a blackscreen. There are some print screens of CPU-Z on my system below!