Hardware Issues Too

[Ashmo]

Today my screen simply want blank.

Sadly it doesn't appear to be the screen that's borked as I switched the screen and the PC still won't boot up properly and doesn't send any signal to the screen.

The PC boots, checks the DVD drives and then just idles. No beep, no audible initialisation, not even a signal to the screen.

I tried removing RAM (afterwards also the graphics card) to check if the MB was still reacting. It beeps a RAM warning as expected, same for the graphics card.

My first thought was broken graphics card, but as far as I can tell it doesn't recognise the graphics card as absent when it's present, so at least the basics should still be intact. The little LED on top of the graphics card also happens to light up on boot.

If the MB was destroyed, it shouldn't do anything at all or at least not beep if components are missing. The cables (in and outside the case) too seem to be where they should be.

Does anybody have any idea which part it could be?

Yesterday evening the screen just want blank (I assume the signal was lost somehow and still is) and the computer kept idling normally. All I get now is "No Input Signal" or a black screen.

Help?

 

[King of Creation]

Well, it's my personal (and recent) experience that despite the graphics card looking perfectly fine, it's probably the cause of your problem. Especially if you're not getting any display. If you can, try testing another video card on your mother board, or test your video card on another motherboard. If worse comes to worse, you can just do what I did: go for a kickass new upgrade. I got a new case, motherboard, cpu, and videocard over the weekend.

 

[SuAside]

it's true, it's a huge pain in the ass to troubleshoot these kinda things. the only 2 ways out is bringing the pc to a hardware fanatic that has some spare parts to throw in & diagnose the problem, or simply bringing it to a pc shop (but that'll obviously cost something).

while the symptoms of your problems are rather vague, the 2 most probable failures are (like KoC said):

- 3d card fubar-ed
- motherboard borked (agp/pci-bus)

(be sure to remove ALL pci cards as well during testing, 1 faulty pci card can fuck up the agp/pci-bus & cause you to have no picture displayed)

 

[Sander]

Another possibility is a fucked up signal cable to the monitor, although that seems unlikely because it doesn't always get a "No Signal" message, but at times it just gets blackness.

 

[Ashmo]

Apparently it was somehow caused by the RAM.

I installed a new motherboard and processor, but the problem didn't disappear. Then I replaced the RAM because I figured it's the only thing I hadn't tried before.

And it worked.

Somehow I think I downgraded my CPU tho. I bought a Athlon XP 3000+, but my BIOS and WinXP tell me it's only 1.05 GHz, although I thought the 3000+ one was ~2 GHz.

I don't know what CPU I had before, but I'm sure it was an older Athlon and had 1.2 GHz.

Weird. Maybe a BIOS problem? Or did they just scam me (unlikely and if so, it'd be really bad -- any way to check which CPU I have exactly without opening the case again)?

 

[Ratty Sr.]

Sounds like your CPU's clock multiplier is lowered for some reason. You should be able to readjust it in BIOS. If I'm not mistaken, default multiplier for the Athlon XP 3000+ Barton CPU is 13.