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Black screen of death in Win 7 64-bit Ultimate - Graphics Card Issue?
Hi everyone,
I have a 2 year old system that was working perfectly with the following specs:
OS: Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate SP1
CPU: Intel Core i5 2400, 3.10 GHz
RAM: 4 GB Single Channel DDR3 821 MHz
Motherboard: ASUS P8P67LE
Graphics Card: Gigabyte - GV-R685OC-1GD
HDD: 932GB Western Digital WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0
Suddenly one day when I was using the computer normally, the screen went black... There was no cursor, no desktop and Ctrl+Alt+Del didn't do anything. I hard rebooted, it started up fine and the windows logon screen appeared. However, as soon as I typed in my password and hit enter, the screen went black again, no cursor, no desktop and unresponsive. Sometimes some funny gray lines would appear on the screen but otherwise it was black.
I looked extensively for answers on this forum and it seemed to be essentially the same problem as described here (Black screen of death in Windows 7 64-bit Professional) so we used Stevan23's post as a troubleshooting guide. We tried virtually everything on Stevan23's list that was relevant to my system, and just like his experience, we never saw the black screen in safe mode.
My partner and I both have identical systems (identical hardware, except he runs a Linux OS), so I was able to test my graphics card in his system. Exactly the same thing happened, i.e. computer starts up ok but the screen goes black after the bios screen and never loads the desktop.
We also tried his identical graphics card in my system; it's working fine and I'm using it now as I type this. Since my graphics card doesn't work in either system but his works in both systems, we therefore concluded my graphics card might be faulty.
It's still under warranty, so we sent it back to supplier (after they gave us advice over the phone agreeing that it definitely sounded like a graphics card fault). However they couldn't find a fault when the card was placed in their system! So we asked them to send the card back to the manufacturer and unfortunately Gigabyte couldn't find any fault either...
Does anyone know why the graphics card wouldn't work in either of our systems but work fine upon testing elsewhere? It just doesn't make sense to me!
I'm trying to decide if I should tell the store to keep the card (since it's useless to us) or pay for the labor and return shipping and attempt further troubleshooting. Any advice or suggestions would be welcome and appreciated.
Thank you :)
imoani
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