Fix or buy new?

[Mercian]

I purchased a Titan Vulcan from here 3 years ago and have been very happy with it. At the time I upgraded to a ATI HD 4870 card and it still holds up to most tests well.

Recently in the last week I began getting occasional freezing (mainly when scrolling on internet pages), the system would generally recover with a error - 'display drivers stopped working and have recovered..'

Over the weekend the pc stopped booting up correctly with the fan whirring away and the beeps suggesting the MB or ram were faulty (not the graphics card though).

Updated drivers, reset the bios (battery out), played with different ram configs with varying levels of success but the problem always returned and now since yesterday, the pc wont boot up (fan whirring away, beep still suggesting MB or ram).

I respect the knowledge of users of this forum as it's helped me before, so do I persist trying a fix or call it a day on this rig folks?


PS - I have been through the trouble shooting guide already, but as the system has been working for 3 years the issue has to be down to software updates or failed hardware I believe. I did roll back the video card driver Catalyst 12.1 with some success (system worked all evening without freezing, but froze again the following morning).

 

[Scuzzy]

depends if you have the cash to replace!

If you have I would say go for it,

if not try some fresh sticks of DDR2 (I presume) one of your friends may have a set you can borrow,,,,

then if no joy try borrowing a graphics card to test out your rig...

we could go on.... =)

 

[Ohlawll]

Definitely sounds as though your GPU is the culprit. Do you have on-board video that you could try? Else, try and get a hold of another graphics card whether its borrowing one from a friend or buying a cheapo from the bay (Its always good to have a spare graphics card lying around anyways ) and see if you still experience this freezing issue.

Edit. Try to see if your machine posts without a GPU at all.