Prepare yourself for a tale of unluckyness and woe! A friend of mine recently broke his graphics card, or at least we think he had. His computer would boot fine, but no video output. To make sure before RMAing it, he brought it round to test in my system.
Usual procedure, power off, discharge remaining power. Old card out, new card in. One of the routed PCIe power conectors wouldn't reach, so I put a new modular one in and ran it direct. I mistakingly put it in 12V1 which is supposed to be reserved for peripherals, but I think running half a card on no load would have caused a problem there. Powered up my system, stays on for a second or two, then powers itself off before POST. Fans spin up, CPU cooler turns on, HDDs start to spin up, then it just powers down. It got stuck in this loop and just keeps going.
I kind of knew this wasn't due to the card, but I was doing this last minute before I had to go out for a poker night. Returned today with my friend to finish testing. Put my card back with the original power connectors- same story. Tried with no card, same thing. One stick of RAM at a time, all unneccesary things removed, cleared CMOS. Tried a different PSU, exactly the same.
It reeks of a power issue to me, but there's nothing wrong with the PSU. I'm thinking maybe a short somewhere causing it to power down. Other than that, it could be the motherboard or CPU, I would have thought a CPU would let it POST first, and I fail to see how this could have damaged it. Motherboard is more likely, but again, it's difficult to see how I could have damaged it without touching it! Everything seems to work fine as well for a few seconds, so I'm sceptical that the motherboard is at fault. That leaves a short, but again, I don't see how a previously non-existant short could have been created after swapping a card!
Give me a hand here, I'm completely at a loss!
Usual procedure, power off, discharge remaining power. Old card out, new card in. One of the routed PCIe power conectors wouldn't reach, so I put a new modular one in and ran it direct. I mistakingly put it in 12V1 which is supposed to be reserved for peripherals, but I think running half a card on no load would have caused a problem there. Powered up my system, stays on for a second or two, then powers itself off before POST. Fans spin up, CPU cooler turns on, HDDs start to spin up, then it just powers down. It got stuck in this loop and just keeps going.
I kind of knew this wasn't due to the card, but I was doing this last minute before I had to go out for a poker night. Returned today with my friend to finish testing. Put my card back with the original power connectors- same story. Tried with no card, same thing. One stick of RAM at a time, all unneccesary things removed, cleared CMOS. Tried a different PSU, exactly the same.
It reeks of a power issue to me, but there's nothing wrong with the PSU. I'm thinking maybe a short somewhere causing it to power down. Other than that, it could be the motherboard or CPU, I would have thought a CPU would let it POST first, and I fail to see how this could have damaged it. Motherboard is more likely, but again, it's difficult to see how I could have damaged it without touching it! Everything seems to work fine as well for a few seconds, so I'm sceptical that the motherboard is at fault. That leaves a short, but again, I don't see how a previously non-existant short could have been created after swapping a card!
Give me a hand here, I'm completely at a loss!
