Thought I'd ask people's opinions about this as I'm not sure what to do next.

After our hols I turned on my PC with the rear rocker switch and it popped a bit but I didn't think anything of it at the time.

When it booted it had swirly patterns on the BIOS and boot screens.,

Gradually this got worse until Windows kept disabling the video driver to stop it crashing, or the PC just rebooted itself.

So being tight I bought a second hand Geforce 8600 passive cooled PCI-X16 card to replace the huge 768Mb 8800GTX that I didn't really need

Plugged it in, blank black screen, no beeps. Tried the card in SWMBO's Dell PC, booted fine with no issues.

Borrowed an old PCI NVIDIA Quadro off a mate and it worked okay but it's sloooow and I still get some graphics glitches in Windows.

So I though motherboard and bought a new one. Installed it today and the 8800 is definitely poked, but I get the same blank black screen with the 6600.

So what could it be? PSU? RAM? CPU?

Not sure what to try next and I don't have anyone to borrow components from :(

After finding out the problems my psu gave me (no sound, slow, etc etc) I would change that first

The popping sound when turning on the switch at the back is perfectly normal, nearly every PC at work makes a cracking sound when the switch is turned on. The 8600 may not be supported by the motherboard, as long as you are sure the motherboard can handle PCI-X16 then it should work fine. I assume you have connected any additional power supply requirements to the graphics card.

Yep - the 8800 takes two six pin power connections and was fine until that point. It'd be a bit of a co-incidence for the 8600 to be unsupported by two boards from different manufacturers and with different chipsets :(

I'm thinking another PSU is worth a go.

Have you plugged the extra power connector onto your new graphics card? If not it won't boot.

Have you plugged the extra power connector onto your new graphics card? If not it won't boot.

It doesn't have one!

Have ordered a new PSU so we'll see. At this rate I'll soon have two PCs

My money would be on the PSU Rob......

Sounds like a capacitor could have 'popped' inside the PSU Rob. Or be on its way out, causing 'odd' behaviour. Could have taken out the graphics card with it at the time, just depends!

Good luck and hopefully the new PSU will sort it

Steve

My money would be on the PSU Rob......

Mine too

Should get it tomorrow so I'll let you know!

Should also make my PC quieter as the one I ordered has a low speed 120mm fan

Im going with the PSU too, my father was once sat in the front room.

The pc was switched off, but had a live source still.

He said there was a noise almost comparable to cracking glass, that came from the computer.

Turned out the psu was funked.

I once had a PSU blow in a PC I built for someone - I guess a capacitor popped or something!

The whole inside of the case was full of smokey black bits and it stank!

The only things that survived were the floppy drive and the 8X CD-ROM

That was a while back then! What have you bought as a replacement anyway? Hope it's something with enough spare capacity

Steve

Tagen are a decent psu, but the price does reflect the quality. I've had the tagen 480w psu around 6yrs without an issue so far (touch wood).

Nothing too fancy:

Vantec ION2, 620W ATX PSU, SLI Ready, Black

Watts 620 watts

Fans 1

PSU Form Factor ATX

ATX version 2.0

Packaging Retail

Colour Black

SLI Ready Yes

Woohoo! New PSU is installed and I'm back in business. Original graphics card is definitely poked, but the replacement 8600GT works perfectly now.

So it was definitely PSU.

On a side note the courier turned up at 8pm and had very beery breath! :eek:

Jolly good.

Shame about the old card... they can still haul some a** those 8800GTX's!

Lol at the delivery man... perhaps he stopped off along the way for a jar or two!

Woohoo! New PSU is installed and I'm back in business. Original graphics card is definitely poked, but the replacement 8600GT works perfectly now.

So it was definitely PSU.

On a side note the courier turned up at 8pm and had very beery breath! :eek:

Just for once I was right :rofl:

I once had a PSU blow in a PC I built for someone - I guess a capacitor popped or something!

The whole inside of the case was full of smokey black bits and it stank!

The only things that survived were the floppy drive and the 8X CD-ROM

I've seen a PSU, infact 30, go up in person which blew the back and fan out, before catching fire!

Great fun when the office back up power spikes 400v 3 phase up the earth

Oooops!

Talking of PC fires my mate installed some PC100 SDRAM in an HP desktop (showing my age again)

When he turned the PC on there was a 10cm red flame from the memory module! I saw it from halfway across the office

He called HP as it was all HP gear and in warranty and the phone tech said "Oh Sh!t that's not good"

Rekon the psu was what took the old gpu out?

Good stuff Rob - nice to hear you're back in business

Rekon the psu was what took the old gpu out?

Yeah I think so.

Glad you're sorted.

I'd replaced my PSU just the week before - bootup problems, system hanging just when desktop appearing, finally taking 5 reboots to load up. Got progressively worse.

Did a Google and 90% concensus was PSU.

So, was going to post but then I saw you'd ordered one