Weird (possible) video card issue

dreamliner77

The Analog Kid
Joined
16 Mar 2002
Messages
4,709
Ok, it looks like tomorrow I will be pulling this particular machine apart and rebuilding. It's a 4 year old machine that I use for video and music in my bedroom. Specs are as follows:

AMD 6100+
Biostar Tforce 550SE mobo
Asus ATI 1650 with stock fanless cooler
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
2x Samsung 1 TB HDD
4x1 GB Wintec Ampx DDR 800
Win XP SP3

So today I went to boot up and it got to the initial XP loading screen. Normally the screen would flicker and then load the desktop. Now the screen flickers and the monitor senses "No Signal" but I can still hear hard drive access. I can boot into safe mode no problem. I tried restoring a backup image from about a month ago and same problem. The bootable recovery media showed no problems.

Next step, decided I'd just install Win7 since I had planned on doing that soon anyway. Looks like it was installing fine... on reboot, it hung during the loading screen and same "No Signal" issue.

So now I decide to see what happens with Linux. I was going to install PinGuyOS. Booted off the CD and decided to let's try Live first. Same thing... It would start loading and then "No Signal."

I'm assuming this is a video card issue. I've had zero issues with this card previously... no artifacts or anything but I also don't play games. I have had a few intermittent blue screens with always different codes but checkdisk has always solved this. I ran diagnostics on the hard drives and they were fine and memtest86 was also fine.

I will swap out with another video card tomorrow and see what happens but was wondering if anyone else had any good ideas?
 
Last edited:
Turns out the DVI out is dead on the card. VGA works. Just going to replace the card altogether.
 
Has anyone heard of the DVI input dying on a monitor? I replaced my gfx card with an Asus ATI 5450 and I still really can't get DVI. The one time I booted and was able to get DVI display, it was as if the entire screen was magnified. The display was set at 1680x1050 yet it looked like 480 and I could drag the mouse to the edge of the screen and "drag" it. if I hook up both dvi and vga, I boot to vga but the monitor won't let me switch to dvi.
 
Ok, confirmed that the monitor works on another PC.

Here is a picture that what I was talking about with the image being magnified. Also, the bios no longer shows over DVI but does over VGA.
 

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I did some digging. With DVI and a monitor that supports analog (4 pins with the blade in the center) and digital (big rectangular grid of pins) data input it is possible for the monitor to get confused if there is data on both inputs at once.

Which doesn't help you at all but was interesting. The cable, the video card or the monitor could have an issue. Or come combinaiton of the parts together may have drifted enough with age to make them finicky.

You did not mention trying a new cable yet.
 
Yeah, switched cables, confirmed monitor worked via DVI on another computer and played around with 'stuff.' I found that my new video card did not like my motherboard. So... here's what I decided to do... I returned the video card and ordered a new motherboard with onboard video. Hopefully this will fix ALL issues I've been having.
 

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