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Here's the story (It's long...) TL;DR at bottomish.
I thought my 8800GTX died on me a few days ago and I was heartbroken. Anyways, I wasn't ready to settle on my video card being dead. The last time I remember it working I had it down to 54c after I applied some brand new arctic silver 5 after scraping the crud that was the original thermal paste off. I cleaned it all up nice and new. I gave it new thermal paste because the last time it was really working in game was when I was playing defense grid and all the sudden a ton of artifacts popped up and then the computer blue screened. I rebooted and upon loading windows I had a bunch of little blue lines about an inch long, a pixel tall, all over the place. Windows never loaded. I rebooted into safe mode and uninstalled my previous nvidia drivers thinking maybe the driver has been corrupted somehow. After I uninstalled them I rebooted into windows and it was working fine at default (low) resolution. I made sure to look at the temps and that's when I noticed I went from 65c to 54c. After the drivers were finished installing (windows default drivers) I rebooted so that I could install the latest nvidia drivers. Windows was shutting down and then just kind of never restarted the computer, stuck at a black screen. I turned it off and back on and then I got hit with no display. I tried a few things to get it to work but nothing ever did. However, my monitor would pick up a signal at the beginning when I powered up, but never actually give me display from then on. At this point I figured my video card was finished.
I was pretty uneasy for a couple days and went over to my friends house to do further testing. We started off by swapping the video cards. We put my 8800GTX in his computer and sure enough it boots up fine and into windows, 1920x1080. Great, my baby is still kicking. So, wtf can it be? We put his 8800GTS g92 in my computer and guess what? Bios shows up. Something isn't adding up here. The one thing I want to mention here is that I never let it go past bios. The 8800GTS only requires one 6 pin PCI-E power adapter so I try both of them out and both worked. So we put my 8800gtx back in my computer and once again, no display. Running out of ideas, we swap power supplies and sure enough the computer loads up and into bios. I did not let it load windows. Figuring it to just be the power supply. We decided that was the problem as he had to leave soon. Anyways, it was working. Everything was back to default in the bios as I used the jumper to reset it all during the process.
I get back to my place and I decided to give my power supply one last try since it was still mounted in the case. After plugging everything in, I power up and bios comes up display and all. So I exit bios and let windows try to load and back come the blue lines. Windows freezes up before it finishes loading and now I'm back at square one with the no display. I swapped over to the power supply that we used to get it to work and the same problem is occuring, no display.
Looking back at it all. It seems that when I try to load windows it's messing with my video card some how. This is when I get all the artifact things, blue lines etc, and then upon reboot I'm stuck with no display unless I swap video cards (I guess) to reset whatever's going on. I'm not sure what's really going on. I want to say it's the motherboard for some reason as I've swapped power supplies and video cards. But the strange thing is, it's not exactly broken, something is just messing up somewhere.
I'm sorry for this being so long but I wanted to try to give as much information about the situation as possible incase anyone has any experience with an event like this.
TL;DR:
Vid card artifacts, blue screens, reboot, freezes, reboot, no display after reboot, put video card in friends computer, works, put back in my computer doesn't work, change power supply, vid card works, go back home, try my power supply again, works, load windows, artifacts, reboot, no display, swap power supply to friend's, still no display. What's causing this problem with the no display, windows somehow? Not sure how it can affect loading up to bios, but something isn't right.
I'm going back over there tomorrow to test all my stuff out until I figure out the root of the problem and I'm going to do a fresh install of windows.
parts:
e6600
intel bad axe 2
4gb corsair xms dominator 1066
corsair 620hx power supply
I thought my 8800GTX died on me a few days ago and I was heartbroken. Anyways, I wasn't ready to settle on my video card being dead. The last time I remember it working I had it down to 54c after I applied some brand new arctic silver 5 after scraping the crud that was the original thermal paste off. I cleaned it all up nice and new. I gave it new thermal paste because the last time it was really working in game was when I was playing defense grid and all the sudden a ton of artifacts popped up and then the computer blue screened. I rebooted and upon loading windows I had a bunch of little blue lines about an inch long, a pixel tall, all over the place. Windows never loaded. I rebooted into safe mode and uninstalled my previous nvidia drivers thinking maybe the driver has been corrupted somehow. After I uninstalled them I rebooted into windows and it was working fine at default (low) resolution. I made sure to look at the temps and that's when I noticed I went from 65c to 54c. After the drivers were finished installing (windows default drivers) I rebooted so that I could install the latest nvidia drivers. Windows was shutting down and then just kind of never restarted the computer, stuck at a black screen. I turned it off and back on and then I got hit with no display. I tried a few things to get it to work but nothing ever did. However, my monitor would pick up a signal at the beginning when I powered up, but never actually give me display from then on. At this point I figured my video card was finished.
I was pretty uneasy for a couple days and went over to my friends house to do further testing. We started off by swapping the video cards. We put my 8800GTX in his computer and sure enough it boots up fine and into windows, 1920x1080. Great, my baby is still kicking. So, wtf can it be? We put his 8800GTS g92 in my computer and guess what? Bios shows up. Something isn't adding up here. The one thing I want to mention here is that I never let it go past bios. The 8800GTS only requires one 6 pin PCI-E power adapter so I try both of them out and both worked. So we put my 8800gtx back in my computer and once again, no display. Running out of ideas, we swap power supplies and sure enough the computer loads up and into bios. I did not let it load windows. Figuring it to just be the power supply. We decided that was the problem as he had to leave soon. Anyways, it was working. Everything was back to default in the bios as I used the jumper to reset it all during the process.
I get back to my place and I decided to give my power supply one last try since it was still mounted in the case. After plugging everything in, I power up and bios comes up display and all. So I exit bios and let windows try to load and back come the blue lines. Windows freezes up before it finishes loading and now I'm back at square one with the no display. I swapped over to the power supply that we used to get it to work and the same problem is occuring, no display.
Looking back at it all. It seems that when I try to load windows it's messing with my video card some how. This is when I get all the artifact things, blue lines etc, and then upon reboot I'm stuck with no display unless I swap video cards (I guess) to reset whatever's going on. I'm not sure what's really going on. I want to say it's the motherboard for some reason as I've swapped power supplies and video cards. But the strange thing is, it's not exactly broken, something is just messing up somewhere.
I'm sorry for this being so long but I wanted to try to give as much information about the situation as possible incase anyone has any experience with an event like this.
TL;DR:
Vid card artifacts, blue screens, reboot, freezes, reboot, no display after reboot, put video card in friends computer, works, put back in my computer doesn't work, change power supply, vid card works, go back home, try my power supply again, works, load windows, artifacts, reboot, no display, swap power supply to friend's, still no display. What's causing this problem with the no display, windows somehow? Not sure how it can affect loading up to bios, but something isn't right.
I'm going back over there tomorrow to test all my stuff out until I figure out the root of the problem and I'm going to do a fresh install of windows.
parts:
e6600
intel bad axe 2
4gb corsair xms dominator 1066
corsair 620hx power supply