Should I send it back under warranty?

[ralph09]

Hey guys,

I am thinking about sending my Graphics card back under warranty, and I wanted to pass it by you guys to see if you agree that it is the best thing to do. I'm assuming it will just cost me postage and they will be happy for me to send it to them. If you think I should take a different course of action, or you think its a different piece of hardware that could be the issue, please say.

My system:
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M720-US3
Graphics Card: 1GB XFX HD4890 GDDR5
Processor: AMD PHENOM2 X2 550 BLACK
RAM: Kingston 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 1066MHz
Monitor: Asus VH222
OS: Windows 7 Pro

The issue:
Pc does not successfully boot from cold the first time round. When power button is pressed, the screen doesn't come on and a system beep either doesn't happen, or happens after a longtime, and eventually the system restarts, but the same thing happens and the loop continues (I think, haven't left it that long.) In order to start up, I hold the power button to force power off, then wait a few seconds and turn it on again.

9 times out of 10, it then works fine. Occasionally however, randomly coloured pixels start to dot the screen, either immediately from the Motherboard startup screen, or a bit later (eg when I start a program after startup) The amount of pixels builds up and the system grinds to a halt. Upon restart, Windows usually tells me there's been a fault with the graphics card, but troubleshooter can't find any solutions.

Occasionally blue screen errors also occur on startup.

Thanks for your time, let me know what you think!

 

[Dave****]

Try another GFX card if you can, but sounds to me like it is faulty and you are right.

 

[ralph09]

Cheers, unfortunately I don't have another card available to try. This problems been going on for nearly a year now, I really should have sorted it! I think I just can't bear the thought of being without my computer for a week or more!

 

[Dave****]

Any friends got any spare ones? Or maybe buy a cheap one from ebay if you can't stand the wait.

My spare ones are being 'borrowed' by two of my friends at the mo

Because it might turn out it's not the card and you had sent it away for nothing.

 

[ralph09]

Yeah, good idea, I might ask around.

I wonder if I might ask you about another issue I have, and if you think that is likely to be the graphics card too.

I played COD MW2 from December to February, and ran it on full video settings with good frame rate and no problems. Today I have reinstalled, and after a minute of playing, it starts running seemingly at a lower frame rate, but quite juddery. This happens multiplayer and singleplayer, so its nots lag. however it also was happening when I turned the settings to minimum, with 640x480 resolution!

Am I right in thinking that if there's a problem with a game like that, then the graphics card is usually to blame?

 

[Vince]

Problems on cold boot sounds like a power problem to me, what power supply do you have? If putting a lesser card in fixes this it still may not be the card at fault which may leave you with a nice bill for shipping your card around.

 

[Aedus]

Really wouldn't assume it's a GPU problem from first glance, more likely a PSU problem.

 

[straxusii]

I wouldnt assume it is definitiely GPU either, you really need to borrow or buy a cheap pcie card to test it.

Have you tried taking the card out, giving it a good vacuum (do not touch any part of the card with the vacuum cleaner) and then reseating it?

 

[marc512]

Occasionally however, randomly coloured pixels start to dot the screen, either immediately from the Motherboard startup screen, or a bit later

i had that problem with my 5770, i used another PCIe slot and it fixed that. But it could still be a graphics card problem.

 

[MeatLoaf]

sounds like your memory to me have you tried a single stick and mem tested it? I had a similar issue with a gigabyte board

 

[EnderXi]

Memtest86 to test the memory when it does boot, a cheap power supply tester from ******s to test the voltage feeds from the power supply (it will check them all and set you back £20) in terms of the graphics card your best bet as mentioned is to test another card.

it might also be worth using prime95 to stress the CPU and check if its that giving you issues as well, it should show up 0 errors after about 1 or 2 hours of running it, best bet is to leave it running overnight to give a good set of results

 

[ralph09]

Thanks all for your advice, I appreciate it.

I am finishing my degree on Friday (woo!) so after I'm recovered from what will probably be a messy, messy weekend, I'm going to revive this thread and start work on the process of elimination.

 

[RizlaKing]

I would start from scratch and do a basic setup test cpu, one stick of memory, gpu and a hard drive and go from there if as you add more to the setup you get problems then likely a psu problem. Sadly there is no quick answer and no way to quickly arrive at a correct conclusion so your going to have to take some time and troubleshoot a bit to try and narrow it down probably not what you want to hear but should narrow it down a fair bit for you .

 

[ralph09]

Yeah, I'm getting that impression from the varied replies I've received. Its not something I've done before but I guess it will be a good skill to have if I want to continue to maintain my PC and know what's going on with it.

 

[ralph09]

OK!

I'm back and ready to try to sort out my PC's issue.

I'm opening the case for the first time since I assembled the computer almost a year ago. The first issue I notice is the main fan on the back of the case has never been plugged in! :-s

As someone asked previously, my PSU is: OCZ Stealth XStream 600W PSU - SLI Ready ATX2.2 12cm Fan

Having opened the case and removed dust, the problem persists. I'm now going to check all connections between components. I'm not too sure what steps to take after that so if anyone has any tips I'd welcome them.

EDIT: I don't know if this is of any use, but this is the error I get when I boot up for the first time and leave it running:

Problem signature:
Problem Event Name: BlueScreen
OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.48
Locale ID: 2057

Additional information about the problem:
BCCode: 116
BCP1: FFFFFA8006670010
BCP2: FFFFF88003C0667C
BCP3: 0000000000000000
BCP4: 0000000000000002
OS Version: 6_1_7600
Service Pack: 0_0
Product: 256_1

Files that help describe the problem:
C:\Windows\Minidump\052810-15334-01.dmp
C:\Users\Ralph\AppData\Local\Temp\WER-65317-0.sysdata.xml

Read our privacy statement online:
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C:\Windows\system32\en-US\erofflps.txt

2nd EDIT: Its very strange; once I shut down the computer normally, if I turn it back on after a few minutes it comes on fine. Only if there's a significant wait do I have to go through the process I described at the beginning of this thread.