Hi PA, let me know if this belongs in H/A and I'll change it.
Let's go back 8 months:
While playing any game (steam game or non-steam game) my monitor would go blue and claim "DVI no signal" and then go into sleep mode (and not be awoken until I restart the computer). The game would freeze and I would get that dreadful infinite sound loop. I try all sorts of things, a new monitor and even reformatting my computer. Then I decided to switch out my DVI cable for an HDMI cable. Now instead of the game freezing and my monitor going into sleep mode the game would simply crash and take me back to desktop. I do some google searching and work out that all this time nvidia experience was "optimizing" my games video settings to high and very high hence causing the crashing. I fix this and the problem goes away.
Now we're back in the present and the issue is occuring again, only I don't get the game crashing, I get the same issue as the very start: "HDMI no signal" and then infinite sound loop and monitor on sleep mode. Now it's even happening when I don't play games, when I'm just surfing the net or watching VLC player or working in matlab or MS Word.
The weird thing is that if I'm not playing a game and when the monitor dies, everything is still running in the background. I can hear my friends still talking over mumble, and they can hear me when I transmit. I can still hear my video or music playing in the background too. The only way to get the screen back on is to restart.
Sometimes even when I restart, just before I get to the windows log in window I get the same no signal issue. It's seemingly completely random. I even took my tower to a store and had a professional check it out and do a "PC check" and clean her out with compressed air.
Any ideas what on earth this could be? It's extremely frustrating, especially when you add in risk of losing important work.
Here are my details:
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
intel i5-2500K
8 GB of RAM
GeForce GTX 560 Ti
and let me know if you need anymore information.
Thank you in advance for taking the time to read my post, absolutely any help at all would be fantastic.
Posts
Otherwise, see if you can RMA the card through the manufacturer. If you decide to replace, a GTX 760 is the minimum I would say you should go for for a noticeable upgrade - that's ~$250.
Regarding "contact problem with the PCI slot", how would I experiment with this? Will replacing the GPU fix this, or is it a problem with case? The issue occurred with a DVI cable and an HDMI, so it's likely not the cable.
Depends. The part of the card that goes in the slot could have an issue. Or the slot itself could have an issue, so replacing the GPU probably wouldn't fix that. I would try with a different GPU and see if you can replicate the issue. What's your motherboard?
No, I mean the contacts on the slot on the motherboard could be loose or coming apart or just dead. Or the contact strip on the GPU (the part that goes into the slot on the motherboard) could have something on it or could be damaged.
Nothing to do with the case.
He suspects the GPU got knocked about a little on the drive to his and knocked back into place or something.
Any explanation for this? I have never reseated anything in my tower so could it be the GPU simply wasn't seated correctly?
@davidsdurions was making a joke about how people in this forum are "enablers" in encouraging others to buy new computer parts.
@dexter it's better not to ask these kinds of questions. When this happens follow the protocol, and if that doesn't work, then get new parts. It sounds ridiculous, but sometimes reseating things and a can of compressed air just fixes things eventhough there is no good reason why. Do not anger the fickle computer gods.