Solved Possible Graphic card failure

[johnnydot]

Hi, I am in need of some help. A few days ago I was watching an auto repair video and all of a sudden the video screen split in two and horizontal lines formed and there was a loud buzzing in my speakers and the screen went black. Keyboard was completely dead so I pressed and held the power button to restart and no screen or boot but had hard drive activity on the computer. Repeated this numerous times no boot but black screen. Figured it might be a graphic card overheating problem so I disconnected cables and power, opened up the case to clean out all the dust and cat hair ( 8 cats ). Unseated and reseated the memory, unplugged and removed the AMD HD 6850 card, blown out the crap, reseated and plugged back the card. Connected up all the cables and power and restarted. Hit the power on and I got the boot sequence started. Figured all was well until the dreaded BSOD appeared with the following message - "attempt to restart the display driver and recover from time out has failed" Was able to boot in Safe Mode with networking. After it booted, there were two 1 1/2 inch lines with distorted color running from top to bottom of the screen. Downloaded updated display driver - no help. Rolled back display driver - no help. Restored complete operating system from a good image on an external hard drive - no help. I am thinking that my AMD HD 685o card has gone south. Anyone have any ideas? I would appreciate any help. Thanks, John

 

[chefduane]

Wow, you did a lot of diagnostics. Do you have another machine or laptop you can port your 'video out' in to? If you switch the other machine to the alternate video source and the other machine does the same thing, then yeah, bad video board on your original machine. Or, more than likely it IS a bad vid board. Just go get a new board and swap it out and that PROBABLY will fix the issue. But to be sure you might try the first procedure.

 

[mrjimphelps]

Do you have onboard video? If so, remove the video card and connect your monitor to the onboard video port. If that fixes the problem, you likely have a bad video card. Since the new video driver didn't fix it, and since Safe Mode didn't fix it, it has to be the card.

Another test: Download and run Speedfan (http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php), to see if your video card (GPU) is running excessively hot. If it is, you have a bad video card.

The good news is, it's an easy fix. Just replace the video card.

 

[Mellon Head]

Caveat about Speedfan. It doesn't read all AMD graphics cards.

Also, don't just click any download link on the Speedfan page. You have to go to the "Download" link on the top of the page here:



And go to the Download section and click on "Speedfan XX.XX (version #)"

I've noticed a few times when upgrading Speedfan that there are various links on the first page which are old versions of Speedfan and they are bundled with reported PUPs and possible malware. These links should be avoided at all costs.Checking the product page, it seems that they have been removed for now, but I'm sure they will return.

 

[johnnydot]

Wow, you did a lot of diagnostics. Do you have another machine or laptop you can port your 'video out' in to? If you switch the other machine to the alternate video source and the other machine does the same thing, then yeah, bad video board on your original machine. Or, more than likely it IS a bad vid board. Just go get a new board and swap it out and that PROBABLY will fix the issue. But to be sure you might try the first procedure.

Thanks for your input on this matter. I got another AMD HD 6850 from Ascendtech for a fairly cheap price ($90) and it solved the problem.

 

[chefduane]

Glad you got things figured out and fixed!