I would've put this under Graphics and Displays, but since it doesn't seem to be the Graphics card...
Looking for input and experience: I keep suddenly loosing video. It's no blue screen crash; processes still continue to run; if I'm watching a video I hear it continue unabated, and when I do the shortcut to shutdown Win 7, I can hear the chime as processes close and the machine shuts down normally. I can then restart, and display normally comes back, but often if I restart immediately display will not come back, suggesting an overheating issue, and the need for cooldown time.
First instinct was: okay, I have a graphics card going south. Since I have a 2 card SLI set up, I simply turned SLI off to run single card to see if it was the primary card. (this of course after a thurough cleaning and check of all internal heatsinks and fans). After the eventual failure I removed the primary and replaced it with the slave card running solo with no 2nd card in the slot, but then that failed as well. So I reinstalled original card with no 2nd card just to verify and it of course continued to fail.
SO, unless both cards are coincidentally failing in the same manner, it isn’t a graphics card issue.
What is it then? My next thought is power supply partial failure, but I’ve never experienced a partial only power failure. Second thought is a localized motherboard issue, but again I’ve never experienced and MB failures that didn’t cause crash or failure to boot. So, before I whip out the multi-meter and start to hunt down voltages, I thought I’d seek input and see if someone might say, “I know exactly what it is.”
Quick and Dirty specs if required:
Gigabyte AMD MoBo running Athlon II X2 3GHz
2GB DDR2
Foxconn Nvidia Geforce 8500GT
Rosewill 400W
2 SATA WD Hard Drives
1 IDE WD Hard Drive
I can give specifics if necessary.
Thanks for any help and input!
Looking for input and experience: I keep suddenly loosing video. It's no blue screen crash; processes still continue to run; if I'm watching a video I hear it continue unabated, and when I do the shortcut to shutdown Win 7, I can hear the chime as processes close and the machine shuts down normally. I can then restart, and display normally comes back, but often if I restart immediately display will not come back, suggesting an overheating issue, and the need for cooldown time.
First instinct was: okay, I have a graphics card going south. Since I have a 2 card SLI set up, I simply turned SLI off to run single card to see if it was the primary card. (this of course after a thurough cleaning and check of all internal heatsinks and fans). After the eventual failure I removed the primary and replaced it with the slave card running solo with no 2nd card in the slot, but then that failed as well. So I reinstalled original card with no 2nd card just to verify and it of course continued to fail.
SO, unless both cards are coincidentally failing in the same manner, it isn’t a graphics card issue.
What is it then? My next thought is power supply partial failure, but I’ve never experienced a partial only power failure. Second thought is a localized motherboard issue, but again I’ve never experienced and MB failures that didn’t cause crash or failure to boot. So, before I whip out the multi-meter and start to hunt down voltages, I thought I’d seek input and see if someone might say, “I know exactly what it is.”
Quick and Dirty specs if required:
Gigabyte AMD MoBo running Athlon II X2 3GHz
2GB DDR2
Foxconn Nvidia Geforce 8500GT
Rosewill 400W
2 SATA WD Hard Drives
1 IDE WD Hard Drive
I can give specifics if necessary.
Thanks for any help and input!