CyberPowerPC - Unleash The Power

Hello, had my Gamer infinity GT for a week now, very pleased with it, been using it for web browsing and the odd game for a week to make sure it isn't prone to falling over. All fine.

This morning I have been using Pinnaacle Studio 11 to finish a video for some friends. I was asked by the software to install some effects from a second DVD which came bundled with Studio 11. This I did, all went well, then I was asked to shutdown and restart. The machine restarts, but I get nothing on my monitor, no signal Input'. I doubt this is pinnacle's fault, as I'm unsure what it could do to prevent the card even displaying the POST.

So... gfx card reseated on motherboard, connections checked at back of monitor and where the DVi cable joins the card - the machine sounds like it is booting as normal, and yet nothing on screen at all.

That said, a 'normal' boot for this machine has from day one involved
me pressing the power button, the machine whirrs into life for a moment, then winds down again, then whirrs back up and goes on to boot ini a regular manner.

I am currently getting bip boop bip bip when booting, my motherboard is a MSI P35 Neo-F P35 Chipset LGA775 and my gfx card is a ATI Radeon HD 4850 PCI-E x16 512MB. No overclocks or anything.

I need to get my video finished and burnt off by Sunday, people are due to take it to France. Support are off at the weekends, so hopefully someone can give me some pointers here, or I am screwed.

Cheers,

Mike

/edit according to the MSI website, the power on - off - on thing is normal. I have tried the monitor with other PCs, it works fine. There are two dvi sockets on my gfx card, tried both of tem, and nothing is working still. PC boots, no display output at all. The fan on the card is spinning as it should.


Edited by governmentyard - 08/Nov/2008 at 14:03

Hi Mike - very relieved to have you looking into this,

Removing either stick of ram is making no difference. Now for the CMOS battery... and a cup of tea/fag while I wait.

Well that's... just.... erm..... woo! I think.

Turned the thing on again this morning just to have a quick listen again to the sounds of it booting to see if I realise anything I'd missed yesterday... and it worked. First time. Booted to recovery menu, so I selected 'last known good profile' and am now sat looking at my desktop.

Very relieved, however we've still got the issue of it not giving me anything to the monitor yesterday for all day, which I don't want to be a regular occurance. I am tempted to make a sweeping guess at it being a heat issue - however I was running Pinnacle studio 9 prior to reboot and the machine has handled much more intensive apps than that, such as Sins of a Solar Empire this week.

I guess my next question then is in Vista, how do I get a log of what was going on when the graphics output was hosed? "Boot logs", or suchlike? Should be some way of nailing this issue if I can see what is or is not happening at boot.

So surprised it worked, when it sprang into life, rather than sit at my desk and use it, I backed away from it and phoned my wife!

Right then -

The issue above turned out to be the monitor - I've had the same problem occur about every four to eight weeks since purchase, always resolves itself the next day... the difference is for the last few weeks I've got another DVI monitor to test on the card and that's that one solved... I need to find out about exchange for that.

I now have another issue, this one seems a lot worse - I recently had Catalyst control centre not come up anymore, the solution was to uninstall and reinstall the software. After a few days successful use I've shut the machine down last night with no problems then this evening I have turned it on to find the graphics card appears to be, speaking technically, knackered.

I've got two displays and on both, right from power-on, there are small red squares across the black of the POST. In Vista black lines are all across the screen, more squares are present, in different colours depending on what should be displayed, I am having to scroll this box up and down to type because lines obscure the words.

Vista tells me upon boot an ATI driver has failed and been successfully restarted. Not that successfully, I think. Looking in Catalyst control centre the GPU temp is 35c, right at the low end of the scale so I'm unsure what the problem is. I'm fairly certain it's not the drivers as the problem occurs from power-on.

I think I might need a new card, and reading some recent stuff about ATI I might need one wiht NVidia written on it instead!

In the meantime though, is there anything I can do to resolve it? I've got a busy time for me and my PC coming up and I'd like to get this resolved as quickly as possible...

apologies for spelling etc if needed, it's been hard enough typing this far without going back to check errors"

/edit ok that's odd - safe mode works fine, while post and normal vista do not. I will now totally uninstall all ati drivers and software and start again, see if that helps.


Edited by governmentyard - 12/May/2009 at 20:03

Picture corruption like you describe normally indicates corrupt VRAM on the graphics card. Nothing to do with the card being ATI rather than Nvidia.

A possible reason for the difference between normal and safe mode in Vista is that in normal mode the Aero interface is on, which is using the 3D capabilities of the card, while in safe mode it is off.

Not sure about the difference between POST and Safe Mode though, apart from the resolution.

Your machine is still in warranty so a card swap can be done very quickly - send a mail to the support address, with a link to this thread and your order number and request an RMA.

Dave

Definitely dodgy VRAM if you're getting corruption in Safe Mode too.

D