Graphics Card fault?

[Neil79]

Through these long summer days my brother's system was rather unstable (BSODS) and in cleaning it out was met with a lot of dust. However many times I told him to keep it clean and keep an eye on the temps, after cleaning it was fine. But new issues started to appear, he was getting a freeze up and sound loop which at first I thought it was a sound card issue. I had the same problem with a real tek. He replaced it with an XFI gamer and the issue has become much worse over time.

He would play a game and it would black screen with the sound constantly looping and unable to ctrl alt del. I told him to turn on bsod viewer and it turned up with an ATI and DX fault, which was pointing to the graphics card? I looked at the temps, volts and they seemed fine with no graphical faults shown in anything. Loading up Heaven benchmark was met with an instant black screen and sound loop. So I decided to look into the system bios just to check a few things, within 1min of being in Bios, Screen goes black.

Does this sound like a GPU fault? I wonder if the unchecked temps and dust has killed it

Q6600
Windows 7 64BIT
Memory @ relaxed timings
ATI 4890

 

[Neil79]

Not enough experts on the forum

 

[swiftmetal]

Before you go down the route of it being a gpu fault have you tried a fresh os install and updating all the drivers for pretty much everything and maybe that will sort it.

 

[Neil79]

Before you go down the route of it being a gpu fault have you tried a fresh os install and updating all the drivers for pretty much everything and maybe that will sort it.

It had a recent format, it was badly virus infected

More porn than an xxx shop!

 

[shankly1985]

In the past when I had Black screen/sound loops it was my PSU. I replaced it and problems was fixed.

 

[Neil79]

It's not that old

In the past when I had Black screen/sound loops it was my PSU. I replaced it and problems was fixed.

Anyhoo did some more testing and was unable to try another graphics card but things are a bit odd. It crashes sometimes with a youtube video and all the time when playing any games. 95% of the time it's a black screen and sound loop, but it's also just shown the game screen frozen and a sound loop.

Decided to drop his clocks everything back to default, cpu was running default and still the issue remained. Tried prime that gave a black screen as well.

Went into Bios again to take a look, BLACK SCREEN. This is at default!

Did a memtest, within about 3% sometimes less, BLACK SCREEN.

So it's going black even in bios and memtest, let alone windows. So that takes windows out of the occasion. We tried another monitor, still doing it.

So that would leave

GPU
PSU

The system doesn't reboot in bios or memtest!