No signal on monitor, eliminated the obvious. Any guesses?

JonJ678 · 8 Jul 2010 at 14:17

This has thrown me completely. Two computers here. One was working fine this morning, the other's been off for a few days. Both make post beeps and whirring noises as they should, but nothing is shown on either screen.

Generally this means a cable's come loose, or something's died. I've swapped cables around, generally looked for burnt areas. I'd put it down to fate and start looking for spare parts, except that there's two of them with the same problem and that seems unlikely.

It's difficult to get at the ram in one machine, and I don't have any spare for the other. Both are watercooled, but neither system is leaking. Hardware list appended, any ideas are most welcome at this point.

Gigabyte UD5 / 920 / corsair
ECS 8100 geforce board / 7750BE / kingston
Both use an 8800gt and a 860W pc p&c.

Current best guess is that the mains electricity is good enough for the computer, but not for the monitor. Doesn't seem likely somehow.

Cheers

edit: I've also done cmos resets, leaving the system unplugged for a while, swapping the monitors over.

Dsteviedee · 8 Jul 2010 at 15:02

You may need to just try each with 1 stick of ram.

Especially now you've reset CMOS as the voltages may be wrong.

It sounds like ram to me but for both to go at the same time seems strange.

Could it be a power surge that has caused this?

JonJ678 · 8 Jul 2010 at 16:40

I've only got one stick of ddr2 for the second desktop

The ddr3 should be fine at 1333mhz 1.8V (fairly sure that's the default), but strange problems with computers do have a nasty tendency to be ram related. Now two of us are looking at that I shall have to start swapping sticks around. Cheers man.

Then the power supplies are probably more resilient to electrical nasties than the monitors. The "quality" of electricity in my flat is known to be appalling so this may well be the cause. I think I'm screwed if that's the case though

edit: finally thought to connect the monitors to something else, they're fine. Stranger and stranger. I'll be heartbroken if its the graphics cards.

Dsteviedee · 8 Jul 2010 at 16:58

Have you got a tv you can connect to, or a friends (lcd of course)?

JonJ678 · 8 Jul 2010 at 17:11

Nope, although one of them does have onboard graphics. Working tonight sadly, so shall need to finish testing tomorrow. Trying to ssh in is probably a good idea too.

Edit: i have one faulty vga cable, one faulty vga to dvi adapter, and hadnt bothered screwing in one of the cards properly. All is well.

Cheers again