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System not booting: graphics card or power supply? UPDATE: It's broken again.
RBach
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So a couple days ago I got back from work to find that my desktop system would not start up properly. Fans would come on, the optical drive would get power (and would open and close when the button was pressed), but nothing appeared on either of my monitors. I gave it some time to boot to Windows, but I never heard any sounds and I was unable to connect to the system via Remote Desktop. Oddly, my router did show the system on the network.
Anyway, I swapped my old graphics card in (a Geforce 7300GT) and the system started right up and has been fine since. I'd assume that would mean my Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 needs to be replaced, but I'm wondering if the problem isn't, in fact, my power supply. I've occasionally had issues getting the system to start in the past where I've had to press power two or maybe three times to get it to finally kick into gear. Additionally, I'm afraid my 3.5 year old 450 watt power supply (from Fortron) might be starting to fall under the strain of my three hard drives combined with the HD4770. I haven't yet gone through the trouble of reconnecting the graphics card and then disconnecting the hard drives to test, however. Granted, two of the drives are supposedly "green" drives, but still.
So now I'm thinking I might just buy a new power supply, swap it in place of the current one, and see what happens. I figure if that doesn't get the Radeon card going again, I'll have a decent supply ready to go for an eventual system rebuild in a year or so and in the meantime I'll have a spare to help troubleshoot other systems or something. However, if it's more likely that the card truly is at fault I'll just wait a bit longer on the power supply front.
Anyway, I swapped my old graphics card in (a Geforce 7300GT) and the system started right up and has been fine since. I'd assume that would mean my Sapphire Radeon HD 4770 needs to be replaced, but I'm wondering if the problem isn't, in fact, my power supply. I've occasionally had issues getting the system to start in the past where I've had to press power two or maybe three times to get it to finally kick into gear. Additionally, I'm afraid my 3.5 year old 450 watt power supply (from Fortron) might be starting to fall under the strain of my three hard drives combined with the HD4770. I haven't yet gone through the trouble of reconnecting the graphics card and then disconnecting the hard drives to test, however. Granted, two of the drives are supposedly "green" drives, but still.
So now I'm thinking I might just buy a new power supply, swap it in place of the current one, and see what happens. I figure if that doesn't get the Radeon card going again, I'll have a decent supply ready to go for an eventual system rebuild in a year or so and in the meantime I'll have a spare to help troubleshoot other systems or something. However, if it's more likely that the card truly is at fault I'll just wait a bit longer on the power supply front.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
RBach on
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I bought a 600W Cooler Master PSU (overkill, but like I said, I intend to future-proof it a bit). It came in the mail Wednesday, but I've been lazy and didn't get around to installing it until tonight. It seems to be working perfectly, and my 4770 is once again back in its home.
So, got home from work today to find the damn thing is doing exactly the same thing as before. Swapped my trust Geforce 7300GT back in and all is well again.
While I was fiddling with the system, however, I noticed something. When I would attempt to power it on one of two things would happen: the system would seem to start up normally (i.e. I'd hear all the normal sounds I'm used to hearing when it starts up--fans, hard drives, etc) with the only difference being no video or I'd hear things start to power up, but they wouldn't quite get there (hard drives wouldn't spin up, for example, but the CPU fan would come on).
What baffles me is that the Radeon card worked for a couple days with the new supply. I've tried reseating it this time, but that didn't make a difference.
I guess my next step is to use the 7300GT for a while and see if I get startup issues with it, too. Maybe it's time for a new motherboard...