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Possible to diagnose potentially faulty card?

sijones

sijones

sijones

Associate
Joined
21 Feb 2013
Posts
29
Hi All,

In Feb '13 I built a PC with my son, following a suggested shopping list from the OC forum. We've been really pleased with it, and it's allowed my lad to play all sorts of games our crummy old PC couldn't manage.

Today the PC started repeatedly crashing. Symptoms are:
Horizontal pixelly lines across the Windows boot screen, quickly followed by either:
1) blue screen of death,
or 2) totally grey screen with no graphics (but the monitor does not give a 'no input' message).

Computer boots OK in safe mode with the graphics card still installed. Have done systematic troubleshoot to the best of my ability (memtest, antivirus etc). The PC runs perfectly in normal Windows when the graphics card is removed (using mobo onboard graphics).

Have removed graphics card, cleaned with compressed air (wasn't particularly dusty), and replaced - no improvement. Have reinstalled drivers & the AMD Catalyst Management package, no improvement.

System Restore to an earlier date does not help. Nothing in the system is overclocked.

Have come to the conclusion the graphics card has physically failed somehow, and have opened up a ticket with OC customer support (it's under warranty, but I don't suppose I'll hear back from them until next week).

But before I waste customer support time, I wondered if there was any way of testing a potentially faulty card to see if my suspicions about it are right? I have access to a couple of other PCs that I could try it in, but they're ancient XP clunkers - don't know if I can expect them to play nice with this graphics card (even if the card is working right)

Card is a MSI HD 7850 OC 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express.

Any advice from the wiseguys would be much appreciated!
 
Maybe worth running DDU then reinstalling lastest AMD drivers, also may be worth checking out the temps of the card with GPU-z.

Could be heat related.
 
Thanks for the reply Ceuotc. I was up very late last night & worked on this right through the day, with no real success (though I have learned a lot about display driver uninstallers)>

Have swept & reinstalled AMD 7850 drivers more times than I can count. Have got rid of the lines across the screen, but now the PC only ever boots into the W7 swirling dots, then immediately goes to a blank screen. I really don't think the computer's crashed - it seems happy enough, it just can't put anything on the monitor.

As before, the monitor doesn't complain of 'no input' (which it usually would in the absence of a signal). I suspect a signal is there - it's just a blank one.

Am currently in a Catch-22 situation where:
1) With the MSI card in, I only get a display in safe mode.
2) You can't run GPU-Z to check the card temperature in safe mode.
3) Onboard graphics won't work unless I physically remove the MSI card - so I can't run any checks on it whilst using onboard graphics.
4) Onboard graphics won't work at all in safe mode, which is severely limiting my ability to sweep the drivers once the MSI card has been removed.

This is an absolute nightmare. The most baffling part is, why now? The most recent change to our PC (if you can call it that) was my son playing Shadow of Mordor on Friday. Is it conceivable that running a game could have triggered all this, or am I putting together 2 & 2 and making 5?
 
Belay point 3)! I just managed to boot the PC using onboard graphics, whilst the MSI card is still in place (messing with the BIOS settings yet again).

So now I can run GPU-Z, but unfortunately it gives no reading for the graphics card: all metrics are 0. I guess the card is disabled 'cos I'm using onboard graphics..?

For the record, whenever I boot the machine with the side removed, the graphics card fan is spinning, as are the CPU, case & power supply fans...

If the graphics card has failed, fair enough. I just have a nagging worry I'll go through a 28-day RMA process to be told it's fine... Anything else I can try to reassure me I'm not on an RMA wild goose chase?

Thanks for any advice, I'm at the outer limits of my ability here...
 
Booting into windows with the integrated gpu is a good thing, at least is is telling you that the boot drive/OS is still good.

If you have not done so already remove the card and then fit the DVI/HMDI or what ever is connecting the monitor to the motherboard display output.

If the system boots fine then it can only leave the MSI HD 7850 at fault. (Sorry just seen you have already done this)

Go for RMA your fault finding has pretty much imo pointed it at the card.
 
Thanks for the advice Ceuotc - I'll pick up with OC when they're open next week. I think the card has 3 years' warranty, which isn't bad going for a relatively cheap component!

You may laugh, but this is the first computer I've ever had with a dedicated graphics card. It's no fun going back to onboard graphics. Everything's so big! And fluffy at the edges..!
 
lol glad l could help.

Fluffy. like it :)

I always keep a spare just in case GPU.
 
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