PC blacking out and restarting

ATIorNvidia · 18 May 2007 at 12:45

Hi,
Ive had this problem for quite a while now and its now starting to happen very often, ive posted a thread about this ages ago, but i hav'nt been able to find whats wrong yet, so here go's

Basically when im using my computer, e.g browsing the internet, monitor would just randomly go blank, sometimes it would go blank...

This is what happens:

1. The screen either goes blank, comes back on after a few seconds and everything would be very slow , like when there is no display driver installed.

2. The screen would go blank, not come back on at all forcing me to restart it from my PC

3. The screen will go blank and then the computer would restart itself, after everything has booted up i get a 'Windows has recovered from a serious error' message and take me to the Microsoft support page, which tells me i have a video card failure.

This started to happen when i had my new monitor, its a Plug n Play Hanns G HW191D Widescreen, im starting t think my VGA card doesnt support widescreen?

I have a ATI Radeon 9250 Sapphire 256mb DDR card (hence its a pretty crappy gfx card).

Any suggestrions please? as this problem is getting worser.

Substance · 18 May 2007 at 12:55

sounds really dumb and simple but have you updated to latest drivers and also i think there is an option in the ati drivers that lets you turn off gpu recovery (there was when i had my 9600 anyway) i found unticking that helped some things

ATIorNvidia · 18 May 2007 at 13:00

Ive installed all the latest drivers yes and i dont have the ati control center thing O.o but when i did, i got th e gpu recovery thing and windows needing to restart =.=

Substance · 18 May 2007 at 13:12

do you have another gfx card you could pop in there to see if that does the same thing?

ATIorNvidia · 18 May 2007 at 13:18

Nope, all i have is a 64mb onboard gfx, and i tried that, it didnt work

ATIorNvidia · 18 May 2007 at 17:48

any1 else have any suggestions, / had this problem before / now a fix/case? i am really puzzled here

ATIorNvidia · 19 May 2007 at 21:50

bump....

ATIorNvidia · 20 May 2007 at 15:19

bump.....

DJ XS · 20 May 2007 at 15:29

Hi there,

I had EXACTLY the same problem with my PC doing this. Completely unexplanable.

Anyway, i put in a new X1950 and it still didnt fix it, replaced RAM with a friends, and even went to the point of buying a new sound card as it seemed to happen more often than not when i was playing mp3s.

Anyway, none of these resolved the issue for any amount of time.

Yesterday i swapped the PSU with one from another PC and so far so good.

Might be worth you looking at doing that

Hope that helps...

smegle · 20 May 2007 at 17:54

DJ XS said:
Hi there,

I had EXACTLY the same problem with my PC doing this. Completely unexplanable.

Anyway, i put in a new X1950 and it still didnt fix it, replaced RAM with a friends, and even went to the point of buying a new sound card as it seemed to happen more often than not when i was playing mp3s.

Anyway, none of these resolved the issue for any amount of time.

Yesterday i swapped the PSU with one from another PC and so far so good.

Might be worth you looking at doing that

Hope that helps...

hi mate,
did your do it just randomly or when the computer was under load? (i.e. orthos)

smegle · 20 May 2007 at 23:01

gonna have to bump cause mine is doing my hewad in (apologies)

t31os · 21 May 2007 at 00:12

Most likely something is faulty, unless you have other parts to test with there's not much you can do.

Go into your bios, turn onboard graphics back on, save settings, power down the PC and boot using the onboard graphics, if thats still a no go then you need to look at trying another PSU or graphics as they seem the most likely suspects.

If you have 2 sticks of memory, you could try using 1 at a time, but i doubt thats the cause of the problem, but another thing to try.

smegle · 21 May 2007 at 16:36

t31os said:
Most likely something is faulty, unless you have other parts to test with there's not much you can do.

Go into your bios, turn onboard graphics back on, save settings, power down the PC and boot using the onboard graphics, if thats still a no go then you need to look at trying another PSU or graphics as they seem the most likely suspects.

If you have 2 sticks of memory, you could try using 1 at a time, but i doubt thats the cause of the problem, but another thing to try.

pretty sure my mobo doesn`t have onboard graphics, is there anything else i could try?

bloodiedathame · 21 May 2007 at 16:54

Take a hammer and bash it around a bit. Ok it wont work but it will make you feel better.

smegle · 21 May 2007 at 16:57

a.hay said:
Take a hammer and bash it around a bit. Ok it wont work but it will make you feel better.

cheers, loads of help :rolleyes:

bloodiedathame · 21 May 2007 at 17:02

Whats the rest of your machine's spec?

Cupra · 21 May 2007 at 17:09

a.hay said:
Take a hammer and bash it around a bit. Ok it wont work but it will make you feel better.

your sig is too high m8 4 lines max

bloodiedathame · 21 May 2007 at 17:15

paul_64l said:
your sig is too high m8 4 lines max

My bad.

smegle · 21 May 2007 at 17:38

a.hay said:
Whats the rest of your machine's spec?

8800gtx @ 692/1100
ez cool 650w psu
e6600 @ 3.55 unstable for anything over 20mins orthos (blend/small ffts/large ffts (even without the cpu @ 100% still re boots))
ocz pc5400 @ 4 4 4 8 1t @788 (8 hours memtest ok)

Watercooling as follows:
D-TEK FuZion CPU Block
Thermochill PA120.2
Swiftech MCW30 Chipset cooler
Swiftech MCP655 12 VDC Pump (Same as Danger Den D5 Vario)
Antec 900 Case