PC Stability problem - Black screen issues. Help :S

spooks

spooks

spooks

Associate
Joined
21 Aug 2007
Posts
235
Hi all,

I am having a slight stability issue with my rig. Spec is:

Q6600 g0 @ 3.6Ghz
8GB OCZ Gold PC6400 @ 400Mhz (Divider 1:1) - Timings 6-6-6-18
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35DS3R
BFG 280GTX OC
620Watt Enermax PSU

Basically, the problem is showing three symptoms:

1) When coming out of standby/sleep mode it switches back on, i.e fans are spinning and the hard drives fire into life, the monitor switches on but the display is black. After a short while the monitor power button starts blinking. If you press the reset button nothing happens. The only way to get it working again is to hold the power down and turn it off and on. Noticed this morning when it happened there was a Red light on the back of my graphics card??

2) When turning my pc on from cold it sometimes does the same as above.

3) Very occassionally it randomly reboot itself (No blue screen of death) just the monitor goes black and then the pc reboots.


Things I have tried:

- Memtest on individual sticks and also with all 4 dimm's loaded. I don't get any memory errors.

- Clocked my cpu back to 2.4ghz with stock settings across the board, still get the same issue

- Prime95 on all four cores for ten hours straight, no errors.

- I have played games such as cod4 and left4dead for several hours without issue.

- Ran 3d Mark Vantage no problems.

I am thinking maybe it is a motherboard problem? I didn't put any extra volts through my board before the problems started happening but I have since increased the mch by 0.1, this seemed to help for a while but then the problems returned.

I am not 100% sure but I believe my issues started happening when I replaced the graphics card and memory. This has been happening for quite a while now and I seem to remember when I checked the event viewer there was some graphics card related errors when it crashed - although I would need to check this to confirm (don't want to throw anyone off course).

All help appreciated.

Thanks,

Spooks
 
I think its prob gfx related tbh
Not sure with NVidia but Im sure they will use same system as ATI, in that the red light on the back of the card will be indicating an error, if you look closely theres prob a code next to it (with ATI there are 4/5 lights and each one means a different thing, eg D601) have a close look next time it happens and head over to NVidia or check gfx card manual see if it tells you what the light means. as it happens from cold boot it would point towards either faulty card or insufficient power as opposed to a heat issue
 
Hmm - maybe you are right. BFG Manuals suck, reading the online manual now and it doesn't even mention any light code. The card is about 6 months old, didn't register for their 10 year warranty within 30 days.

I originally thought it might be a power thing but if it is able to run for several hours and bench marks okay then surely it must be getting enough power?

Cheers
 
I think you are right about the power, just checked the amp rating on my psu and it supplies 36A over the 12V rails, GTX 280 needs 40A. :(

I have been running like this for months and am a bit concerned that I could have damaged my hardware somehow?

Could someone with more knowledge than me tell me if this will have happened? Hoping it won't be a problem. :(

Thanks all.
 
no its not likely, its just that when it gets to full load it stresses the PSU and so shuts down, its not likely to have caused further damage so long as the PSU hasnt blown itself, which it obviously hasnt as its still working, but you want to invest in a decent PSU asap, something like this will do, or if you think you might add a 2nd card later in SLI then go for the 850W version
 
95thrifles said:
no its not likely, its just that when it gets to full load it stresses the PSU and so shuts down, its not likely to have caused further damage so long as the PSU hasnt blown itself, which it obviously hasnt as its still working, but you want to invest in a decent PSU asap, something like this will do, or if you think you might add a 2nd card later in SLI then go for the 850W version
Click to expand...

Thanks - how do you rate Antec PSU's, I saw this 750Watt True power one which I thought looked okay?

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-116-AN&groupid=701&catid=123&subcat=1088

It can take 62A across the 12V rails and is slightly cheaper than the bequiet!
 
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