PC acting up horribly.

[Guest]

I recently bought a new 250 gts to replace my 8800gts which was overheating terribly (hitting over 110degrees celsius). At first the card performed great but lately I've noticed games running poorly and recently, I have been having trouble starting the PC. I've heard the beep code 1 long and 3 short meaning graphics adapter... but I've also gotten repeating long beeps which I believe means memory. I recently replaced the ram too. I tested the memory with memtest86+ and it passed. I ran 3D Mark Vantage and my score was:

P7833 3DMarks
CPU Score
24849
Graphics Score
6377

Now my rig is as follows:

Vista 32 bit
Asus p5n-e sli
800 Watt PSU
2x2GB 800 mhz ram
MSI Nvidia 250GTS
2x320gb hard disk in raid

I've experienced crashes in wow, and black screens during team fortress 2 with an error saying display driver stopped responding and has recovered. I've taken out the ram and video card and reseated it. I havent tried the old card or ram yet, which will be my next test, to at least see if it boots up without fail. It takes 2 tries to boot my pc now when I reboot, there will be no display the first time, everytime. Usually there is no beep code.

My guess is the card is faulty but I could use suggestions. That 3d mark score is really low for this rig, no?

 

[Guest]

I should add the first time I had failed boots was before I changed the memory.

 

[RetiredChief]

Generally boot problems are hardware related, the problem is identifing the Problem.

On PSU: You did not specify the "Brand" is it a good one, or one that the ratings indicate that it should be used as a door stop. The first thing I would do is monitor the Voltages (ie CPUIDs HWMonitor) and see what happens to the voltages when you transition from Idle to a heavy load. Use prime95 blend test, you can also run furmark to load the gpu.

For memory test - Memtest is great for checking the memory prior to installing the operating system, or after making a harware change and befor booting into windows. After that Prime95 is a MUCH better program to run, it will Identify problems better and faster than memtest.

For GPU, only good way is to swap card.

 

[borisof007]

Hey Deceitfulninja,

You're on the right track in terms of troubleshooting. Definitely switch out the GPU and see if you're still getting problems. The 250 GTS's TDP is very low, so I doubt it's a lack of power from the PSU.

Doubt it's a driver issue because your compy would still POST every time.

Yeah, switch out the GPU and see if you're still getting the same problems. If you are, then it may either be a memory problem or a Motherboard problem.