Bho on 16/7/2010 at 13:37
Hi Guys,
My trusty Nvidia 8800 gt started playing up on me recently - games would occasionally crash with messages such as "Out of VRAM" or just ctd without any message/freezing. When rebooting, I would get a black screen.
Interestingly enough, if I left the computer alone for an extended time (e.g overnight) and tried again, eveything would be fine. In order to test whether the card was really the problem, I waited for it to black screen on me, then switched over to my onboard video. There were no problems with the display.
Armed with this knowledge, I decided that it must have been the video card that was the culprit. To add to this, I also noted that the card would get quite hot to touch, even after a couple of minutes or so of being on. (This was at the desktop, not playing a game btw).
Thanks to these events, I went out and bought an ASUS EA5770 today. After plugging it in and applying power, I got the same black screen that was reserved for my 8800 gt earlier. The fans on this card appear to be spinning nicely, so it seems to be getting power. My PSU is a 550 W Thermaltake, so I assume it should be OK. I've also tried to reduce the load by unplugging my DVD drives and secondary HDs, but no dice.
The motherboard in this sordid tale is a 945GM3 from msi. My cpu is a E4400. I've done a bit of googling, and it appears that 5770s have some troubles with motherboards that are PCI-E 1.0. My motherboard falls in the 16x category, so i'm not sure if it is affected by this.
Thanks in advance!
Al_B on 16/7/2010 at 15:27
Quote Posted by Bho
My motherboard falls in the 16x category, so i'm not sure if it is affected by this.
According to the Intel (
http://download.intel.com/design/intarch/manuals/30882301.pdf) document here the G945 chipset supports PCI Express 1.0a, not 1.1 or higher.
According to a quick google search (probably similar to yours) one of the symptoms is very slow POST - a least a minute. Have you tried leaving it for a while to see if it eventually starts up? The other usual recommendations are making sure you've got the latest BIOS version and that you've tried clearing the CMOS before starting up.
Bho on 17/7/2010 at 07:32
I've tried clearing the CMOS through using the "reset to default" settings on the bios screens - is this sufficient? Haven't updated the bios yet but will do so soon.
An interesting point is that even though there is no video output from the VGA or DVI port of the 5770, the computer still seems to boot up and function normally. In fact, if I switch the VGA cable from the video cards socket to the onboard after about a minute of the computer being powered on, I see my desktop! I've tried disabling the onboard card under safe mode, but this seems to have no effect.
When I installed my 8800 GT previously, I actually went from using the same onboard graphics to the video card. I never encountered this problem of having the onboard card displaying the graphics, while the video card did nothing.
After a bit more googling, i've turned up this (
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/285613-33-radeon-5770-displaying) link which appears to indicate that my chances of getting things to work with this mobo are slim. I was planning a system upgrade in the near future, looks like i'll have to push it forward a bit!
