Scary moment..

Altanore

New Member
Need some peoples thoughts on this :eek:

I went to turn on my PC today to find that my screen would stay blank like my PC was off with the LED blinking on the monitor. However, my PC was working since I have a LCD screen in my drive bay and it shows when it is loaded into windows. Plus my hard drive showed activity so i knew it was not my PC.

Came down to two things, my monitor was dead or my video card was dead. If I detached the monitor cord from the video card, the screen would come on saying "no connection". Plug it back in, it would go blank again. Tried another monitor... would not show anything either. So by then, I knew it was my video card.

My video card is a Saphire Radeon X800XL 256mb DDR3 but with the default cooler replaced with a Zalman VF700-CU cooler which greatly brought down my temps. Since with the default cooler, my video card was reaching 75C on load... now it's down to 54C on load.

Anyway, I started overclocking it a while ago since now I had room to do it with low temps. I was using only the ATItool to do it and it does not save the settings... video card will go back to normal if i reboot and I have to apply them again via the ATItool when I load into windows. However, I normally apply them when going into a game.

This is how much I increased it by:

Default Clock speeds:
Core: 398.25mhz
Memory 492.75mhz

After overclock:
Core: 444.27mhz
Memory: 522.82mhz

It ran stable at this speed and it had no artifacts... ran it like this for a few days now.

However today, it would not show anything on the screen.. and it ran perfectly this morning. So I took the video card out.. checked it all, blew on the PCI express slot and the connectors on the video card to remove any dust in case that was the problem.. did not appear to be any dust though and everything looked fine on the video card and the cooler was tight. Only problem I did find was that the screw came loose that holds the video card bracket on to the case.. so the video card was fully in the PCI express slot but it was sort of loose where you could easily move the card up and down. After I tightened the bracket to the case, plugged everything in, the screen finally turned on and it booted into windows.

So I'm just wondering if the overclock did something or was it because the card was a bit flimsy due to the screw being loose. I think it was because it was a bit flimsy since the card is still stable and showing no artifacts and that it was not overclocked when I turned the PC on. However, it was fully in the PCI slot.. so, I just want to be sure so that I can continue to overclock it :eek:

Would not of been a big issue if it did die since I could of just got something better like a geforce lol. Only would suck because I'd have no pc for a while :P Was hoping the monitor was dead though! lol.. get an LCD... lol anyway, sorry for the long message.. but I had to explain everything :) Thanks in advance.
 
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I think it was the overclocking... since it just did it to me again. This time, it was not loose.. but I took it out and put it back in and it still did not work. Then I blew on it and gave it a nudge.. then it finally started... dunno why it's so fussy.

Could be something wrong with the slot.. not sure since when overclocking, there is no sign of it being unstable and temps are super low. Also there are no artifacts accuring.

I won't apply the overclock settings tonight and see if it does this again tomorrow. Else, i'd just be getting a Geforce 7900 :) Perhaps the video card is fine though and it's the motherboard... but the video card is half alive since the monitor shows no connection if i unplug it from the video card. The computer also boots into windows fine so I don't know.
 
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Really... motherboard is not that old, only around 7 months. Guess i'll see what happens tomorrow or this weekend, if it does it again without the card being overclocked.

Oh maybe i did something wrong, just thought of it. If I overclock my video card, do i have to increase the PCI-E mhz? I don't think you would have to...
 
Ya, it keeps doing it... I shut it down for a moment while I did some other stuff just to see if it would do it again, and ya it did. Gave it a nudge, no go. Then i blew on it.. then it worked again. Tried to see if it would do it again a few times after that but it worked everytime. Maybe dust is shorting it..... but then it should fail while in use...

Sort of hard to find out what it is since I got no other hardware to test the motherboard or the video card since it is PCI-express. System is totally stable during normal applications and games. Tests show no errors on the video card either.
 
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