Help with an 8800 GTX behavior problem

[GautLSU]

My specs are as follows:

Gigabyte DS3R Motherboard
Intel Q6600 (with TRUE 120)
EVGA Geforce 8800 GTX
4GB (4x1) Crucial Ballistix PC-6400
Corsair HX620 PSU
Centurion 5 (multiple fans)

The rest is essentially yadda yadda except perhaps a Dell 2405fpw connected via DVI. Pretty standard stuff you all are familiar with, right? Anyway everything with the configuration has been performing great for quite some time (most of a year). Yesterday, when powering on, I got no POST, no signal to monitor, and no hard drive activity that I can tell. So I held power button to shut down, then powered back on - boom everything is fine. So I figure, well, stranger things have happened... no big deal.

Today, once again, I go to power on... and same thing - no activity, no POST, no boot. I did notice, however, that the 8800 fan was spun up much louder than usual (as if under full 3d load). Again I manually power off and power back on, same thing. Hrmph. Next I cracked the case open to investigate, and it's certainly the 8800 fan going full tilt. Not sure what to do next, I shut down and pulled out the video card. Did some compressed air dusting on everything (which wasn't all that dusty) and reseated the card. Plugged everything back in, and this time it boots to Vista like normal... as if nothing had ever been wrong.

You guys have any ideas on this or similar experiences? A 20 min googling didn't turn up anything helpful. At first I thought my card was toast and headed for RMA land, but now for the time being it's back to normal. In the past, high-whirring fans have signaled to me failure of a card or a power supply, so I'm wary of my 8800GTX going down. I don't think it was actually dust buildup causing a heat problem because it happens right away, before the card even has a chance to get going... on the other hand, a little dusting never hurts.

Anyway thanks in advance for the help!

 

[kirbster]

I have seen this happen when a power supply is starting to give up. What PSU are you using?
Generally it will be a hit or miss thing until it finally will no longer boot at all.

Opps I see you are using a corsair. Nice PSU. More than enough oomph, but i have had a corsair 520 blow on me after less than 5 minutes before, so they are not immune to manufacturing defects.

 

[silent-circuit]

This could just as easily be your motherboard. Unfortunately, none of the symptoms point definitively to the card, PSU, or motherboard, but they're all on the list.

Also consider running a few hours of Memtest86 on your RAM, a pair at a time (not all 4 at once) if it doesn't sort out after a while. Much, much less likely, but possible.

 

[Nenu]

I had the same behaviour when my PSU was struggling.
Try unplugging anything you dont need and see if it improves.
ie hard drives, usb devices, pci cards...

If you can borrow another good PSU to test, you may get a definitive answer faster.