No post beep, strange goings on with graphics cards.

[johngordon]

Hi all,

This is my first post here, and I am a desperate man.

I have just sepnt a fair few quid upgrading my PC. Its a budget gaming rig that is used for games such as GTR evo and Race 07 so it did not need to be mega powerfull.

Firstly this is what it is,

Asus M2R32MVP motherboard. (About 2 years old)
AMD 6000+ CPU (am2) (brand new)
4 gig of ddr2 800 ram corsair (brand new)
Akasa powermax 850w psu (brand new)
Saphire HD 3870 (blue one) (brand new)
Saphire HD 3870 (blue one) (brand new) (crosfirex via bridge)

It was set up about a week ago the only thing carried over was my old motherboard. Its running on Windows xp 32 bit service pack 3.
I was working fine and got a reasonable score of 12470 on 3dmark06.


So last night i was playing away and all was well, logged off the pc and went to bed.

Got up this morning and went to check my emails before work, pressed the power button and waited to boot, first thing i noticed was a lack of beep and obviously no picture on my monitor.
Tried again and still nothing, no post beep and no signal to my monitor.

I opened the case and tried the power again, I have a green power light on the mobo but could not see any cables loose or anything like that.
It was at this point upon the 4th attempt to fire it up that i noticed that the fain on the main graphics card starts to spin then dies, the fan on the slave (second slot) remains still.

The graphics cards have the 6 pin power calbes plugged in and as said last night everything was working fine.

I am not very pc minded to be honest and I am lost. I know you will not be able to tell me the problem but can you please help me identify the problem or at least narrow it down.

I dont understand why my graphics card's fan is trying to spin then stops and the second one just looks plain dead no life at all.

Plese help, sorry for long post and please excuse my spelling (i have a valid reason, hehe)

John

[Lord Filbuster]

Tried using the cards individually? One of them may be damaged.
If they work individually, but not together, it could be the motherboard or the power supply. (i'd guess the motherboard, since it is older.)

[peterb]

My first thought would be power supply failure.

[sadbuttrue]

Oddly enough I had this same problem last night. During basic light use (browsing the web) my PC decided to switch itself off without warning. Trying to turn it back on resulted in no response, other than 0.5seconds of fan spinning. I then tried a spare PSU, which resulted in the PC powering up fine... but the graphics card caught fire

My conclusion: The seasonic PSU sensed a short circuit of some kind in the graphics card and refused to boot. The spare PSU had no such protection measures and allowed the faulty card to power up.

Anyway, the card is going back for a replacement tomorrow. The PC boots fine with no video card, so all other components are working.