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Unhappy new year

Devious

Devious

Devious

Soldato
Joined
29 Dec 2003
Posts
4,178
Location
UK
Ive just spent 2 days re-building my rig with in a new mountain mods case with dual loops, looks the biz, must have spent £200 on w/c bits & bobs. I also bought a second hand BFG H20c for one of the loops.

I switched on late last night and all was well except for squealing through my speakers, the tone change when i moved the case around :confused: I had had enough of fiddling with computers for that day and thought i would sort it with a clear head today.

Anyway, last night I was just browsing and checking up on my email, probably only been on the pc a couple of hours been when my BFG card started artifacting, I turned off felt the card, seemed cool, no leaks etc rebooted and the post screen was just garbled then pc shut off :(

Card is now dead and with it being second hand no warranty. The really doubt the seller will help as i got him to knock some money off due to lack of warranty through a dispute.... doh!



I find it odd that it died whilst browsing etc, when i first turned on i tested the card with furbench for 15 mins and it was fine with temps only reaching 50c. I was wondering whether it was linked to the squealing and something was shorting.


So today i tried to find out the cause of the squeal, i suspected a motherboard mount my be shorting something. Ive spent 4 hours and removed everything from the case inc motherboard, i hooked up the mobo out of the case with just sound card and to my shock the squeal was still there !

I then remembered I have installed this which has a pass through cable that you plug your mains into then this plugs into your psu, it then measures your power consumption, i removed the pass through cable and pluged mains directly in to psu and noise gone. I cant believe i dismantled everything before remembering this :mad: another waste of a day. Not sure whether this could have harmed the BFG card though.


Anyway rant over, i hope your new year is better than mine! & dont buy second hand.


.
 
fornowagain said:
I know I bought an OCZ PSU of the MM, hardly any use by the looks of it. Lasted 24hrs before it died.
Click to expand...

PSUs and HDDs are the only two things i will never ever buy second hand purely for these reasons :) they've always seemed the 2 most likely components to die through faults of their own
 
So whilst the Zalman causes that weird noise, could it not be that for some reason it was causing the card to be underpowered (??) thus leading to it's death?
 
I seriously doubt it was the Zalman controller that caused it. I have one in each of my pc's and have never had a problem with them. More than likely that the card had a fault. Do what the others have suggested and RMA it to BFG saying it was a gift.
 
Pulse said:
So whilst the Zalman causes that weird noise, could it not be that for some reason it was causing the card to be underpowered (??) thus leading to it's death?
Click to expand...

Not sure, ive removed the zalman to rma.

neocon said:
have you tried the card in another computer?
Click to expand...

No, i dont have another pc, and not so easy with it being water cooled though i doubt a quick post on another pc before it warmed up would hurt. I have tried another gtx280 in and that works.


pastymuncher said:
I seriously doubt it was the Zalman controller that caused it. I have one in each of my pc's and have never had a problem with them. More than likely that the card had a fault. Do what the others have suggested and RMA it to BFG saying it was a gift.
Click to expand...

I doubt it was the zalman, but strange how a card working fine died a dead within a couple of hours whilst the zalman squealed away. Looking on BFGs website I cant see where you could rma it as a gift. It seems you need to be the original purchaser and the card registered in your account.
 
What GPU block are you using? A lot of talk on XtremeSystems about EK full covers killing a lot of cards.

Think they were the 280s, but been out of hardware for over a year now.
 
Mekrel said:
What GPU block are you using? A lot of talk on XtremeSystems about EK full covers killing a lot of cards.

Think they were the 280s, but been out of hardware for over a year now.
Click to expand...

The BFG block is a custom block made by Danger Den for BFG.
 
Update, just got word from the seller saying he would rma for me.

I just now popped in back in for one last go before draining loop and removing card and its working :D It must have been the Zalman causing some kind of electrical fault ?



Ill see how it goes today before i count my blessings as i have had it working for an hour before.
 
Spoke too soon,

I played WoW for 6 hours yesterday with no problem, i then left PC on and got some supper and came back to black screen with artifacts :confused:

i rebooted and it was still artifacting.






I turned it off the the night and its ok again this morning.


Im stumped, maybe its PSU ? I have a Silverstone Zeus 850W so it should be fine on paper, but maybe it losing its efficiency being nearly 2 years old.
 
Might sound crazy but have you tried a different dvi cable or even tried it with a vga+adapter?
I had similar problems when i had one of those DGMs and weirdly a new cable fixed it for me.

-Chris
 
Did you not have 4850 crossfire running on that same psu? I think that would draw quite a bit more juice than the bfg. I am not really a believer in something was working perfectly fine then not working when someone has been tampering with it. The fact you did a new build points to the card i think. Confusing how it lasted so long though and black screened on the desktop.
 
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