Dead MOBO My Giga-Byte GA-7VAX is screwed up. I happened a couple days ago. About a week ago I would come home and my box would have restarted itself and I had an error report about they video card causing the system to crash. My first thought was drivers, so I jumped on the Nvidia site (I use a ganeric TI-4200 4X 128MB card) and grabbed an archived driver version. Still had the issue.

On my day off I kinda left my big machine (nickname: Krysta) alone and did most of my work on my laptop (Janelle) and my 2nd XP box (Stephanie). What seems to be happening is the video card is giving out, because the screen will go black and the monitor will kick off as if I turn the PC off. It's not hibernate or suspend. It just dies, it brings the whole system with it. I tried to VNC into Krysta but it wouldn't respond.

So I killed the box and threw in my old trusty Radeon 7500. With this card the screen was off register, the screw would scramble constantly. It was very odd, ckecked the screen resolution and refrest rates but they were all ok.

Next I popped out that card and dropped in a Radeon 9200 I had in a friend's system I was working on. With this card it wouldn't even bring anything up on the screen.

By now I'm a little mad. For a last chance I drop in my OLD Voodoo3 3500 TV card. Here I get the same thing as the 7500 (but still get the "3DFX" look (inside joke)). So I'm going batty because of course my powerpoint presentation for church is on that machine. This is my modded to crap box so I didn't want to pull the HD because I have modding done to it and it would have screwed up my wiring. So I got the machine to run long enough to grab the files over the network.

My guess is that the AGP port on the MOBO is going, all thos video cards are fine, but yet they all have issues. Those issues accur in both POST/DOS and Windows/Linus so it isn't a driver issue. Has to be hardware. I haven't had a free hour to call Giga-Byte. I currently have my notebook hooked up to my monitor, keyboard and mouse. I'll be glad to get this thing fixed. Posted by chris at 09:46 PM Hardware • (0) Trackbacks