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Started by XedinUnknown | | 7 answers
PC randomly stops liking some display adapters
Hi! Got an issue that's been haunting me for months now. Please, if somebody can figure this out, I'd really appreciate the help. Here's the deal.

I'm no expert in hardware, but I know some things. I decided to buy and assemble a new PC myself, so, among other things, I got an Asus P8Z68-V LE motherboard and a GTX 550 Ti card. The setup had been working fine, until the graphics cards started to behave in weird ways and one day stopped working. Of course, I began wondering what the problem was, and so, to test, I swopped cards with my friend who had some not-so-great Radeon. Turns out, his card works on my PC, and my card works on his PC. Puzzled, I settled for this configuration, since I didn't have money to buy another good graphics card, wasn't even sure what the problem was, and my i7 2600k had enough power to allow me to do everything I could do before, just slightly worse.

A week ago the ATI card suddenly stopped working. I just switched on the PC, and there was nothing. The onboard adapter was ok though. I tried different BIOS configurations, the other PCIE port - I thought it's either a broken card or a broken port - nothing helped. So I asked another friend to let me test with his hardware, and viola, same thing again: his nVidia card works on both PCs, my card only on his. Driven by a hunch, I swapped back with my first friend and got my GTX 550 Ti back. After a couple of hours and a few BSoDs, my old card started working again, and has been for a couple of days now. However, still the system was not so stable: sometimes I got "CPU Overheated" messages during boot, BSoDs, strange sounds etc, but not that often.

Now, I must say that I have 2 monitors: a smaller ASUS, and a huge Samsung TV. The TV is set as the primary monitor, extending onto the Asus. Suddenly, this happened: whenever I move the mouse pointer into the secondary desktop, the pointer is displayed in the top-left corner of it, and almost doesn't move. I can move the mouse around the desktop, open context menus with it where it would have been, trigger hover effects etc, but the displayed cursor stays in the corner. I can even move it back to the primary monitor, and then it disappears from the secondary one and behaves as supposed ont the primary one. If I use the Screen Resolution interface of Windows to switch them around and make the smaller one primary, the cursor remains crazy on the previously primary desktop (smaller one).

I uninstalled the drivers for the card; the system auto-installed them again, but the problem persisted. However, while without driver, the cursor goes back to normal. I played around with the settings in the NVIDIA Control Panel, and somehow, the cursor is now "invisible" on the larger monitor, so now I had to set the smaller one as primary. All this makes me think that it's not the DVI ports, not the mouse, not the monitors themselves, but the card.

Please, could someone tell me why my PC stops liking the different display adapters, and then starts liking them later on? How can I fix this and enjoy a stable experience for all the effort put into this blessed rig? Also, what's with the cursor thing, and how can I fix this, or at least use the large monitor again?

Thanks in advance.
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April 27, 2014 1:39:11 AM

Tradesman1 said:
Might be PSU or the cables from the PSU

My PSU is an Antec TP-750. There are 2 cables for the potential cards in the 2 PCIe slots. Plugging in a different cable does not make a difference. Also, my previous card did not need additional power supply. When it stopped working, the fan wasn't even spinning. It was working on my friend's PC after that.
Update: Display driver crashes have become very regular, even on the Windows login screen. I've also now disconnected 2 SATA drives, leaving me with just the system HDD.
a c 993 Ĉ ASUS
a b Î Nvidia
April 26, 2014 11:43:22 AM

Might be PSU or the cables from the PSU
April 26, 2014 11:22:13 AM

Will try to find a different PSU. I already tried different GPU, and it was working. In fact, I was using a different one for many months, until the same thing happened with it.
Just to recap: my GPU works on other machines, and other GPUs work on mine.
a c 993 Ĉ ASUS
a b Î Nvidia
April 26, 2014 9:08:00 AM

DO you have or could you borrow a different PSU to try with? May be bad GPU or PSU (could also be mobo, but would look at the PSU first, then the GPU - might also see if a different GPU works OK
April 26, 2014 5:12:21 AM

Update: Cursor no longer a problem.
However, any game freezes after some time, like 30 seconds. Plugged the card into the second PCIE slot; no change.
Switching to another task and then back unfreezes the game for another 20 seconds.
The driver crashes periodically.
April 26, 2014 2:20:33 AM

Tradesman1 said:
Sounds like might have gotten or had a driver get corrupt, generally if changing GPU its a good idea to uninstall the old drivers and run a registry cleaner to clear all traces of it


Since then, I had done a Windows reinstall with complete formatting of the system drive. Before that I had reinstalled the drivers a few times.
Also, the problem starts while still at boot stage, when drivers are not yet loaded.
The problem is now very intermittent, and presents itself in various ways, starting with driver crash, and ending with inability to boot even to BIOS.
a c 993 Ĉ ASUS
a b Î Nvidia
April 23, 2014 5:37:03 PM

Sounds like might have gotten or had a driver get corrupt, generally if changing GPU its a good idea to uninstall the old drivers and run a registry cleaner to clear all traces of it

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