Win7 Ultimate x64, BSOD when waking up from automatic monitor shut-off

No crashes yet, but I just caught it doing the weird thing where it spins the fan up for a few spins and then stops over and over again while idle. However, when I gently moved the case in an attempt to open it up without tapping anything to push it out of idle, it immediately stopped doing it. Maybe that's just an imbalanced fan or something? I'll give it another day or two crash-free before I'm confident it was just a bad driver install.

Well, mystery solved I guess... I just sat down to honestly have my first long gaming session with this new rig. Made it about 3 hours of playing Guild Wars 2 before the whole rig hard shut down mid-game. After that, it wouldn't even POST. I swapped the power supply with a known good unit, same problem, took every component out and tested them one by one. Everything worked right up until I put the video card back in. With the card in, the motherboard gets power, but once you hit the power button it turns on for a fraction of a second before it turns everything right back off, hopefully from motherboard safeguards preventing the defective card from frying everything else. Swapped it with the old HD 5870 in my old rig and of course, the new system POSTs properly and the old one (with the new card in it) only turns on for a fraction of a second before it shuts off again. Just put my RMA request in with newegg, hopefully the replacement card works and the old card didnt take anything else down with it Thanks for the help, as unfortunate as the end result turned out. Hopefully the thread helps some other people identify similar issues and replace their card before it dies on them too!

So...

I got my new video card from the RMA on monday, and everything was working perfectly right up until a few minutes ago when it did it again. Went into idle, and refused to come out. Keyboard lost functionality, mouse lost functionality, and when I unplugged them and plugged them back in the LEDs wouldn't come back on. Had to hold the reset button to restart.

Now i'm wondering if I was sent a *second* bad video card, or was something else the problem all along and the video card failing was totally unrelated.

Unfortunately since it didn't bluescreen when locked up this time, there's no new dump file to analyze.

However, we're also back to really odd fan behavior while idle, and this time I got the chance to catch it in the act. There's two groups of indicator LEDs on the top of the card, two in each bank are always lit and the fans are always spinning. As soon as windows turns off the monitor, *these LEDS turn off and the fans stop spinning entirely*. Its as if the whole card has been turned off to save power, but the big glowing MSI logo dome still stays lit up like the sun. Every minute or so, these LEDs kick back on for between 2 and 4 seconds, the fans spin up to 30%, then it all turns right back off again. This is 100% reproducible at least since the crash yesterday, I don't know if I just didn't notice it before or if its new behavior. I grabbed a video of it with my phone that I can upload to youtube or something, and i'll take some pictures of the LEDs and which ones stay lit up and post them as soon as I have time to pull the whole thing apart today. I also have a GPU-Z log that clearly shows the behavior, when the LEDs are off it records junk data, and then records those 3-4 seconds of spin-up perfectly fine every time.

I've never heard or seen of a card completely turning itself off to the point where the fans dont even spin when the computer goes idle. My old 5870 sounds like a jet engine 24/7, it definitely doesnt shut the whole card down when the monitor turns off. These crashes might have something to do with the card not properly powering back up from this temporary off state, causing current devices to stay somewhat powered but not properly powering newly introduced devices, which might explain why the keyboard/mouse LEDs still work and you can still access the filesystem across the network.

No fan controller software outside of CCC, but I never enabled the overclocking settings to manually control the fans and it does it even if I totally uninstall CCC.

I took my 5870 out of my old PC and put it in the new one, letting windows install just the basic drivers. It works fine, no odd fan behavior when the PC goes idle.

I put my 7870 in the old computer, letting windows install just the basic driver. *it does the same thing*. PC goes idle, fans turn off, lights turn off, every minute or so they pop back on for a few seconds and then go off again.

The odd thing? If I plug it into my TV or my monitor via HDMI, *it doesnt do it*. It only happens over DVI. I swapped out the cable (again) and it didn't make a difference. I guess because the HDMI signal has the power component to it, it just cuts the video signal and doesn't shut down the card itself. But why would the card shut itself off like that to begin with?

I've got those pics of the lights, i'll post them later. Both sets of lights that are lit when the card is on are labeld +-, whereas the unlit lights surround them are all labeled with error codes, so i'm guessing they're just the "yeah, the card has power" debugging lights.

The fact that it does the exact same thing in another PC entirely should logically rule out bent processor pins, motherboard problems, PSU problems, and RAM problems, i'd hope.

It is still under warranty, it *just* got back from RMAing the first card, it's brand new. The newegg reviews for the card apparently have over 25% reporting dead cards and issues though. I think i'm just going to end up sending it back and buying a whole different card unless you can think of anything else that might be the root cause. I really don't want to wait another 2 weeks on an RMA to get back a *third* defective card.