Associate
I'll put this in general hardware since this may not be purely a graphics card problem (even though it might obviously appear so)..
I have an MSI K8T Neo2 board with an A64 3500+, and use a ASUS N6600GT Limited Edition AGP card.
Basically, last week I thought I'd have a good clean up in and around my system, involving taking the processor and heatsink/fan out and giving it a good clean, and taking my graphics card apart and giving it a good clean and treating it to a dob of new thermal paste.
Except, when taking the heatsink on the graphics card off using, stupidly, a flat-bladed screwdriver to release the plastic holding pins on the back, the screwdriver slipped and scored the back of the board. Now, a tiny capacitor was destroyed (although I didn't notice this straight away) but the actual score down the back didn't pass through any additional circuitry and from what I (and an electronics friend) could see the destroyed capacitor was the only damage taken.
With the card in the pc, the system wouldn't POST at all. I used another card to get into the BIOS and reset everything to factory defaults but still nothing when the 6600GT was back in. This was when I had a closer look at the card and noticed the damage to the capacitor.
So, I passed the card along to a friend who is experienced in all kinds of electronics wizardry who initially had the same result with the card in one of his machines. He replaced the broken capacitor, and huzzah! It worked perfectly in his main testing machine and all of the features appeared to be functioning as normal and played games fine - I don't know the exact board and chipset he was using, but i'll find out. As a precaution he also checked over the rest of the components using magic and thought everything was A-OK.
However, it still failed to POST in his three other test machines, still failed to POST in my own machine, and also failed to POST in every machine I have access to being an IT engineer.
Being an IT engineer also makes this thread a bit of an embarassment for me but I really have run out of ideas.
So far it works perfectly in one machine out of about 9 or 10. What is so special about it? The fact that the card does work gives me hope that the card is ok and if I could just get the right settings it would fire up.
Tonight I am going to get access to a floppy drive and do a BIOS upgrade on my machine, but the fact that the card has failed to work in a majority of machines leave me little hope that this will work. I wouldn't have thought graphic drivers would be an issue at that stage in the boot-up sequence. I've tried the usual troubleshooting of removing any devices that aren't needed (pci cards and drives) and clearing the CMOS.
One thing my electronics buddy noticed was that as soon as he added a pci network adapter to his machine with my gfx card installed, the machine failed to POST. He took my gfx card out (and left the network adapter in) and the machine booted as normal. I have a built-in network adapter.
Should I just admit defeat and throw it in the bin? It cost a fair whack (for me, anyway) and I'll try anything to get this back up and running. Any ideas?
If anyone can help I'll have their next 10 children ^_^
I have an MSI K8T Neo2 board with an A64 3500+, and use a ASUS N6600GT Limited Edition AGP card.
Basically, last week I thought I'd have a good clean up in and around my system, involving taking the processor and heatsink/fan out and giving it a good clean, and taking my graphics card apart and giving it a good clean and treating it to a dob of new thermal paste.
Except, when taking the heatsink on the graphics card off using, stupidly, a flat-bladed screwdriver to release the plastic holding pins on the back, the screwdriver slipped and scored the back of the board. Now, a tiny capacitor was destroyed (although I didn't notice this straight away) but the actual score down the back didn't pass through any additional circuitry and from what I (and an electronics friend) could see the destroyed capacitor was the only damage taken.
With the card in the pc, the system wouldn't POST at all. I used another card to get into the BIOS and reset everything to factory defaults but still nothing when the 6600GT was back in. This was when I had a closer look at the card and noticed the damage to the capacitor.
So, I passed the card along to a friend who is experienced in all kinds of electronics wizardry who initially had the same result with the card in one of his machines. He replaced the broken capacitor, and huzzah! It worked perfectly in his main testing machine and all of the features appeared to be functioning as normal and played games fine - I don't know the exact board and chipset he was using, but i'll find out. As a precaution he also checked over the rest of the components using magic and thought everything was A-OK.
However, it still failed to POST in his three other test machines, still failed to POST in my own machine, and also failed to POST in every machine I have access to being an IT engineer.
Being an IT engineer also makes this thread a bit of an embarassment for me but I really have run out of ideas.
So far it works perfectly in one machine out of about 9 or 10. What is so special about it? The fact that the card does work gives me hope that the card is ok and if I could just get the right settings it would fire up.
Tonight I am going to get access to a floppy drive and do a BIOS upgrade on my machine, but the fact that the card has failed to work in a majority of machines leave me little hope that this will work. I wouldn't have thought graphic drivers would be an issue at that stage in the boot-up sequence. I've tried the usual troubleshooting of removing any devices that aren't needed (pci cards and drives) and clearing the CMOS.
One thing my electronics buddy noticed was that as soon as he added a pci network adapter to his machine with my gfx card installed, the machine failed to POST. He took my gfx card out (and left the network adapter in) and the machine booted as normal. I have a built-in network adapter.
Should I just admit defeat and throw it in the bin? It cost a fair whack (for me, anyway) and I'll try anything to get this back up and running. Any ideas?
If anyone can help I'll have their next 10 children ^_^
plus that would be ethically wrong 