Skip to main content

troubleshooting - Computer doesn't start when graphics card plugged in


Symptoms: after changing heatsink on graphics card, computer won't turn on when graphics card is plugged in PCIE slot. When I press the power button, fans move a little bit and that's it.


The card is XFX Radeon 6850. With the card not plugged into motherboard, but plugged into power, computer boots. With the card in motherboard, with or without power, it doesn't.


The heatsink was Arctic Cooling Accelero S1Rev2. It was a tight fit, and I had trimmed some of the heat spreaders to get them to fit. When testing with Furmark one of the temperatures was much higher than others, so I decided to reapply thermal paste. After doing that was the last time the system successfully POSTed, it went like this: BIOS screen came up, GRUB came up, Windows started loading, and then the screen went black, all fans stopped, and the power LED started flashing. It continued flashing even after I disconnected power cord from PSU, and stopped at the moment I disconnected monitor.


I took the heatsink off the card again to check for obvious shorts, put it back together, still the same.


I understand that the card may very well be dead now--maybe thermal paste spilled somewhere, maybe static electricity hit at some point, maybe heatsink touched something it shouldn't have, or maybe just not delicate enough handling. Anyhow, given the symptoms, what would be your guess what's gone wrong?



Answer



This sounds like the GPU on your card is fried. This is very similar to how CPUs fry when you don't fit the heatsink properly. You will turn on the PC, it will maybe get as far as booting into Windows if you're lucky, then it dies as the CPU overheats.


The same thing will happen with a graphics card GPU, so unless you are 100% sure the heatsink was seated on the GPU, it has probably overheated and fried.


By the way: Maybe thermal paste spilled somewhere. This wouldn't do anything as it isn't conductive – well unless it is silver compound – and even then it is only slightly conductive so wouldn't make any difference. The worst it would do is slow things down slightly or cause artefacts.


Maybe static electricity hits at some point – static is a possiblity when you had the card out of the system. If it struck the memory on the card this wouldnt do it much good.


Maybe the heatsink touched something it shouldn't have. This is the most likely thing that happened. If you have ever fried an old harddrive on purpose when you were younger, if you cross any of the circuits on the drive it doesn't tend to die straight away, it usually takes a few seconds before things heat up enough for it to cooks an onboard chip and dies.


Or maybe just not delicate enough handling (possibility again, but I think the above is more likely).


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

How do I transmit a single hexadecimal value serial data in PuTTY using an Alt code?

I am trying to sent a specific hexadecimal value across a serial COM port using PuTTY. Specifically, I want to send the hex codes 9C, B6, FC, and 8B. I have looked up the Alt codes for these and they are 156, 182, 252, and 139 respectively. However, whenever I input the Alt codes, a preceding hex value of C2 is sent before 9C, B6, and 8B so the values that are sent are C2 9C, C2 B6, and C2 8B. The value for FC is changed to C3 FC. Why are these values being placed before the hex value and why is FC being changed altogether? To me, it seems like there is a problem internally converting the Alt code to hex. Is there a way to directly input hex values without using Alt codes in PuTTY? Answer What you're seeing is just ordinary text character set conversion. As far as PuTTY is concerned, you are typing (and reading) text , not raw binary data, therefore it has to convert the text to bytes in whatever configured character set before sending it over the wire. In other words, when y...
Post a Comment
Read more

linux - Extract/save a mail attachment using bash

Using normal bash tools (ie, built-ins or commonly-available command-line tools), is it possible, and how to extract/save attachments on emails? For example, say I have a nightly report which arrives via email but is a zip archive of several log files. I want to save all those zips into a backup directory. How would I accomplish that? Answer If you're aiming for portability, beware that there are several different versions of mail(1) and mailx(1) . There's a POSIX mailx command, but with very few requirements. And none of the implementations I have seem to parse attachments anyway. You might have the mpack package . Its munpack command saves all parts of a MIME message into separate files, then all you have to do is save the interesting parts and clean up the rest. There's also metamail . An equivalent of munpack is metamail -wy .
Post a Comment
Read more

keyboard - Is there any utility/method to change Windows key bindings to type rare chars to currently empty bindings?

I'm currently typing this post with my windows XP machine and (Spanish) keyboard, and I'd like to add some extra symbols to my text. I could open the "char map" windows utility, look for the desired symbols, and paste them. But I'd like something quickier. For example, when I'm using my OSX Mac at work, I can easily add a ©, ™, ® or similar symbols, just pressing some weird ALT-GR + G / H / J, key combinations. In my (Spanish) keyboard mapping, these combinations are empty, as they don't produce any char at all, which, on the other hand, is perfectly normal and desirable. So, I thought: Why couldn't I add some extra key mappings on top of my currently empty ALT-GR + G/J/H Keys in my Spanish keyboard, and thus, being able to quickly type these special symbols? So that's my question: Is there any utility/method to achieve that effect under windows? (My version is XP). I've even googled this for some time but no luck. I've been a long term Hot...
Post a Comment
Read more

Desktop reboots itself on sleep or hibernate

I have been using an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard for main home desktop workstation, operating Windows Vista x64. This computer has right from day one not been able to enter hibernate or standby; after Windows performs its final actions and brings the machine down, it would automatically revive itself for a reboot. Updating to the second latest BIOS (1201)has not helped (the latest BIOS revision would induce video refresh problems rendering it unusable). I have been reading related discussions on incidents similar to mine to no avail of a true workable solution. They appear to be more speculative guesses rather than actual knowledge on the inner workings of motherboard hardware. Does anybody have any electronic engineering experience on PC energy-saving standards to provide a more informed opinion how to go about getting this to work? More stories: this motherboard could not even reboot properly the first thing i used it. It was due to refresh rate of the onboard GPU, which had no influe...
Post a Comment
Read more