Computer Wont Boot! New gfx card

Firefly86

Firefly86

Firefly86

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Joined
19 Jul 2006
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258
Location
Gibraltar
Hi guys,

I'm having some problems with an older machine that belongs to a mate of mine.
Specs are

Asus P4S800
Intel P4 2.6Ghz
Radeon 9250 256MB Ram
2GB Kingston Ram
300W PSU

Nothing special at all. Computer was working fine up until friend decided he wanted to play Sims 3, but it wouldn't play with the 9250 due to pixel shader version. So got a cheapo card for him, the GeForce 6800 512MB.

The computer would not longer boot reliably. I say reliably because perhaps 1 in 5 times it will boot successfully into windows. But most of the time what happens is that the screen just goes blank after POST, and nothing happens, fans all stay on, hard drives still spinning, but nothing on the screen it never actually reaches the Windows XP logo screen.

I placed the original 9250 radeon back in and the problems went away, I thought faulty graphics card but why would it boot sometimes and run fine for hours?

I thought maybe it wasn't getting enough juice from the 300W power supply so tried a 550W PSU of my own in his machine, same problem didn't seem to help at all.

Am I right in thinking the graphics cards borked? If it never boot at all I might have thought that but its just random.

Any ideas?
 
Unfortunately there is only 1 other bios update for this mobo and its a beta bios update. I can give it a try but the bios description doesn't seem to have any beneficial improvements.

What sort of settings could I change in BIOS? I've only seen things like changing default video from PCI to AGP. Changing memory size from 32MB to 256MB etc.

Thanks for your advice :)

Will try the 6800 card in my machine and see what happens...
 
hi satriani, thanks for the advice.

I thought about that too and used driver cleaner to make sure there weren't any remnants of drivers left in there but unfortunately it didn't help :/

Sometimes I can't even get into safe mode coz as I mentioned it seems to freeze/screen goes blank just after POST before windows logo ....
 
ye im a little confused too :S never come across this before

yea its where its happening thats causing problems, if it decides to boot its all runs fine until the next time you try and turn on the machine, but if it decides it dusn't want to Im pretty much screwed as I can literally only get into the BIOS, I can't even get to the Boot from CD stage its literally right after the BIOS and HDD search screen.

I tried my 550W PSU thinking perhaps it wasn't getting enough wattage but that didnt help at all.

what sort of readings in BIOS would be worrying? Here's what I get with the 300W PSU:

VCore Voltage : 1.58V
+3.3V Voltage :3.28V
+5V Voltage : 5.02V
+12V Voltage : 11.58V
 
hi sasahara,

yea I used the 550w and gave the 6800 its own power cord but still the same intermittent problems.
Even went as far as to try a fresh install to make sure it wasn't a driver problem but still happens :/
 
hmm same thing also happens with a geforce fx 5200 I had lying around. Only card that manages to start up all the time is the 9250.

I think you could be right westom. I think its a power problem but not with the PSU if that makes sense as changing to 550W makes no difference, im starting to think it might be a problem with the mobo's agp slot or a problem with how it distributes power to the agp slot
 
well turns out it was the motherboard.

Swapped it with another and no problems so far...

westom what numbers are you referring to voltage readings? I don't have a meter that I can use :/
 
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