Is my card actually broken or is this normal??

[JonathanCasey]

Ok, I am so fedup at the moment
I bought a new graphics card for my AGP / DDR / Socket A motherboard to replace my GeForce3 Ti-200 Deluxe for my birthday present (2 weeks ago).

The graphics card (Saphire x1950 Pro AGP) arrived along with a cheap £20 500watt PSU (all from scan) which I tried and found my pc wouldn't boot. I was very dissapointed and then realised buying £20 PSU's is very ill-advised

Anyway, I went and forked out £70 for a good 620watt 18amp 4x 12v rail PSU that should do the job perfectly. Then when I tried it, it still wouldn't boot correctly. It booted once, then if i tried to reset it wouldn't boot. I pulled the power out, removed the cmos battery battery etc. and it just wouldn't boot (no beeps or anything). The most irritating thing of all being that after 100 attempts at turning it on, it would on the odd ocasion actually boot. I actually at one point managed to spend 4 hours playing in windows and checking out some ATI techdemo's etc. - was quite fun - but then when i needed to reset it died and wouldn't come on so I gave up.

I was very upset at this point as I bought this on the day of my birthday and hoped to have it up and running before the day was up.

I tried the graphics card in 2 other of my PC's with the new powersupply and found both of them didn't boot properly either. They would work the first time, then once every few power-ons.

Ok, so I went along with all this and decided to buy a brand new motherboard socket 939 / AGP / DDR. Got the best one I think is available - MSI Platinum K8N Neo2 along with a nice new 939 4200+ AMD x2.

At this point my nice cheap £140 upgrade has turned into a huge £300, time wasting project from hell.

Ok, so my lovley new motherboard and cpu arrived and I spend 7 hours putting it all into my Antec 900 case and re-fitting all my CPU water cooling setup with a new water block (costing £30). I (and this is the present time) have just turned the thing on and it booted first time. WOHOO!! I was almost crying with excitement.

Anyway, I went into bios to check the cpu temp, waited a minute for it to stabilise and then exited without saving. The pc tried to reboot and I bet you can guess what happened next...

Yep, my insane-o birthday upgrade has failed completly. All my money and time over the last 2 weeks has been invane, I have a now non-workable machine that wont boot properly.

I'm now 99% sure this is the graphics card to blame as it doesn't work in any of my AGP computers and I've tried the other more expensive powersuppliers we've got around the house.

The 12v molex amps are all fine, I've even gone overboard and tried using 2 PSU's combined. Its completly useless.

At the moment it will boot if i keep turning it on and off but that's just no use for me as I need to reboot now and then without the hassle of 'kick starting' the thing.

Now does anyone have a problem with the saphire x1950 pro AGP card not reliably booting or am I just stuck with 5 incompatible motherboards / PSUs and CPU's ?!?!

Please for the love of my sanity can someone give me an idea of what on earth is wrong :'(

Please!

- Jonathan Casey (now 19 !!)

[vinnyT]

May have been better to have started your own thread, got mid-way down before realising I was reading a thread from Nov'06.

Yes, it would appear that it is the gfx card cusing your problems, you seem to have eliminated most other (normal) cause of your trouble. I have read quite a few posts, in this and other fora, of problems relating to the 1950 pro (and more than a few mentioned sapphire)

Is there any chance you can borrow another card to try (though i know this may be a problem, as it's an agp card)?

Good luck

[Lee H]

May have been better to have started your own thread

I've split this off and made a new thread rather than having it deep down a old one

[Philipp]

JonathanCasey

If you can log a query here

http://web6.scan.co.uk/Support/Query.ASP?QueryType=R

We can raise a returns number for the card and test the item.

Failing that you can PM me your invoice number and ill sort it

Best Regards

[JonathanCasey]

I'm new to the forums and can't work out how to PM you, any chance you can give me a hand?

[vinnyT]

Hi Jonathan,

If you look at philipps post, on the right hand side there are 5 buttons, the one you want is the leftmost button (send PM, ironically), just click that and enter the details philipp requires into the text box, then click 'submit message'. Job done!

[JonathanCasey]

that button isn't there though...
My brother says its something to do with me being a brand new member...

ed: my luck isn't getting any better

[JimNastics]

Rule number 1: never, ever build or upgrade PCs on anything other than a normal day. I remember spending my 21st getting extremely worked up trying to fix a botched gfx card upgrade, in the middle of summer. Never again. Just wait until you've got a boring day, with nothing better to do, and it's raining outside Anyway, I feel your pain, I hope you get it sorted.

[JonathanCasey]

As I seem unable to PM I may as well just say it in this forum:

I live close to the shop (I live near Manchester) so I could come in if it would speed up the process. I've been dyeing to get this running for weeks now, The stuff will need upgrading again by the time its done

[pollaxe]

Yeah you need x number of posts - 5 I think - before you can PM, just post a couple more times and you'll be good to go.

[JonathanCasey]

Rule number 1: never, ever build or upgrade PCs on anything other than a normal day. I remember spending my 21st getting extremely worked up trying to fix a botched gfx card upgrade, in the middle of summer. Never again. Just wait until you've got a boring day, with nothing better to do, and it's raining outside Anyway, I feel your pain, I hope you get it sorted.

I've been doing it over the last 2 weeks, and yeh, doing some of it on my birthday was a bad idea as it got me worked up and feeling misserable when I was supposed to be enjoying my party with friends, lol.

[JonathanCasey]

Yeah you need x number of posts - 5 I think - before you can PM, just post a couple more times and you'll be good to go.

Oooo, If I keep quoting people I'll be there in no time

Thanks!

[JonathanCasey]

JonathanCasey

If you can log a query here

http://web6.scan.co.uk/Support/Query.ASP?QueryType=R

We can raise a returns number for the card and test the item.

Failing that you can PM me your invoice number and ill sort it

Best Regards

Is Philipp still active on the forums at this moment in time? Anychance I could get a responce for one of my prevois posts:

"I live close to the shop (I live near Manchester) so I could come in today if it would speed up the process. I've been dyeing to get this running for weeks now, The stuff will need upgrading again by the time its done"

edit: I'm going to get told off for spamming if I keep posting...
Would someone PM Philipp on my behalf and ask if he could check back to this thread? (I'm not sure, But I figure PMs are more likely to get his attention - I presume it'll send him an E-Mail or somthing)

[Philipp]

JonathanCasey

Sorry mate

Yeah not a problem pop down to the store.

Best Regards

[JonathanCasey]

Ok, I can come down and be there in around an hour (2:30) but need to leave by 3:45 so I can't stay long, will this be enough time to do what's necessary?

thanks a lot Philipp
Will you be there? And who should I talk to when I get there?

- Jonathan Casey

ed: i'm setting off now, i couldn't find the recipt so i'll be another 20 mins, sorry.

[JonathanCasey]

Wohoo

I went to scan and had a nice conversation with the hardware tech guy and told him the whole story, he was very nice and had ago at running a benchmark and then tried rebooting and said it did exactly what I said on his system. He didn't quite understand why the graphics card would make a computer boot once but then not reboot. But he agreed it was faulty and gave me a replacement.

I've just got back and put it in and it boots every time

So I'll say again:
Wohoo!! My birthday present is complete

Thanks to everyone for helping!

Edit:

The card still seems faulty... It boots every time when i use the reset button (which didn't work before) but it doesn't boot backup when I do a soft-reboot (from exiting Bios or with ctrl+alt+del).

I don't have the time or petrol money to go back to scan so I'm just gonna stick with this and hope it doesn't get worse, I can live with needing the press the reset button every time I need to reboot the computer... (i think...)