One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

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The following has been posted on the Graphics forum but since it doesn't look like a graphics issue any more I've brought it here. I've gotten nowhere with this despite hours and hours of tinkering, and am currently stuck with a very large £1000 paperweight and whatever is on telly.

Neeed halp!
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OP:

Right,

The new 5850 in the sig below has ended up being RMA'd; didn't work in my rig and didn't work in the test rig at my mate's shop, so back it goes.

In the meantime I've had to fall back on my old 7900GS (the 8800 the 5850 is replacing is fried and gone to GPU heaven) but since having the 5850 in the case everything seems to be all screwy. There may be a problem with boot devices in addition to the following problem, but one thing at a time eh.

Main symptom atm is that it cycles through the VGA bios splash 3 times before it gets to the motherboard bios (about 5 second delay between cycles), which immediately makes me suspicious of anything that happens after.

Can anyone offer an opinion as to if this is a gfx or mobo issue? Anyone seen anything similar before? I'm stumped, tried just about everything I can think of, including my old PSU (exactly the same behaviour) and currently it's stripped down to just mobo, cpu, gfx and one stick of RAM (tried all 3 sticks in a variety of slots).

It's all very confusing as the exact same configuration had run just fine for about 2 months prior to attempting to install the 5850. Any chance a faulty card could have fried something somewhere?

All guidance and opinions gratefully received.

13th Mar 2010, 15:56 #2
555BUK

I had a similar issue with my P6T-SE and first 5870. Sometimes the pc would restart 3 or 4 times before seeing BIOS splash screen and other times it was fine. In the end I solved the issue by updating my P6T-SE BIOS to the latest available on ASUS'' website.


14th Mar 2010, 18:55 #3
d1am0nd g33z3r

Excellent suggestion, thanks. Flashed bios to latest rev (1201) which has occurrenced the following:

a) It exhibits exactly the same behaviour as before except:
b) The bios no longer sees my hard drive if I plug it in

This is par for the course this weekend, whatever I try it seems to throw up a new and different problem. As I said though, one thing at a time, I'd settle for some progress on the multi-posting VGA bios issue as a first step. The only time this does not occurr is immediately after a bios reset, any changes to any of the bios settings (including even the date & time I think) and it immediately starts misbehaving again.

Any other suggestions?
 
Lots of those kind of problems (in my own experience anyway) can be memory based.
Have you tried it with a completely new stick/sticks or borrowed from someone?
If the problem persists you can at least then rule out a memory problem...
Just a thought.
 
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I had a very similar issue with my new 5670 and an Asus board. It attempted to post 3 times then booted - but then was all over the place.

Originally I thought it was a PSU issue but I replaced the MB with a GB one and it has been fone since. Someone else also had the same issue and it turned out to be an incompatibility for him too.
 
Silly question but is the motherboard missing any capacitors or have any swollen or burst? (a google will show you what they look like when they go)

I had a machine with a missing cap that functioned OK although the bios cycled on boot 3 times before working .... Might be worth a check
 
Thanks for the suggestions, I'll take a look for missing caps when I get home tonight, although I'd be surprised if anything was broken as it's all only 8 weeks old and I have soft hands. ;)

Karl, do you mean an incompatibility between the mobo and the RAM? I've eliminated gfx pretty much as I have same issues with a bottom of the range bog standard VGA card as I had with the 7900. I don't think I've got any DDR rolling about other than the Geil that's in it, but I'll try and get hold of some.
 
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