Did my video card die?

A

alexyang

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 9, 2004
Messages
311
I've had a desktop from iBuyPower that I bought in September 2011. After an initial hiccup (defective video card and hard drive) that was addressed in 30 days, the system had been working perfectly...until today.

I was playing Skyrim earlier this afternoon, and the display driver stopped responding and then recovered. A few seconds later, both my monitors went black and didn't recover after a minute. I did a cold reboot, but my DVI-connected monitor flashed a "no signal" message. I turned it off, waited a few seconds, and turned it back on, but the same thing happened: "no signal."

I popped my case open, and I noticed that on the area of the removable panel that is adjacent to my video card, there seemed to be "sawdust" and only in that area. (Of course I'm not talking about actual sawdust, but that's what it looked like.)

I searched for similar threads, and most of them seem to deal with people who were in the final stages of the build process. In my case, my desktop had been working since September 2011, so I don't think it was a "component not properly attached" thing.

Is my best bet now to see if I can borrow a video card from someone?

PSU: Corsair CMPSU-650TXV2
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-P67A-D3-B3
CPU: Intel Core i7 2600
RAM: 8GB (2GB x 4) DDR3-1600, 9-9-9-24
GPU: eVGA GeForce GTX 460
 
If it were the power supply, then would the CPU fan still whir after power up?
 
It's something that we ask about as part of the troubleshooting process.

The "simple answer" to your problem is to try out the video card on another system that's known to work fine. But if the iBuyPower system is your only machine, we may have to figure things out a different way.

Have you reviewed the troubleshooting sticky?
 
alexyang said:
If it were the power supply, then would the CPU fan still whir after power up?
Click to expand...

It is absolutely possible for a bad power supply to still power up a system but the system fail to post. In my experience it is more common for a bad PSU to exhibit this behavior than to die altogether. The only way to know is to swap parts with a known working system. There are also PSU testers. Good luck.
 
Thanks for the replies. None of my local friends are "enthusiasts," so I went to a nearby shop and paid for a test. Still waiting on the results, so I guess for now I can't do much but check GPUs and PSUs on Newegg.
 
alexyang said:
One year for parts, so it's expired.
Click to expand...

there might be warranty with the original manufacturer, just give whoever made the card a jingle and see if they might take a look at it too, check with evga
 
Thanks for all the replies. I just got a call from the shop, and they stated that my system posted and loaded the OS after swapping out the video card, so right now, I guess that was the problem.

I'll look into seeing whether I can send the card to eVGA, as it seems like there's a (limited) two-year warranty on parts.
 
If you paid via credit card, you'll have a 1 year minimum warranty extention. Keep receipts of all the parts you bought. Call your CC company's number on the back and ask about the insurance plan provided by your card. You should be able to get the inspection and new card covered under warranty.
 
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