thedionysian

Hi, and thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

About 2 weeks ago, my computer stopped booting up normally. Rather, the computer would emit one long beep followed by three short beeps and the monitor would remain black w/ the yellow standby/hibernate light on.

I can't for the life of me figure out what BIOS the motherboard runs, and that beep code on an AMI BIOS could mean a memory failure while on an Award BIOS, it's a display problem. I figured that because the display wouldn't come on, it was a video issue, opened my tower and saw what is displayed in the attached image.

Now this may be a ridiculously stupid question, but is this proof-positive that the video card is irreparably damaged? I've seen PCI cards in the past with similar cracked "cylinders" and they've still worked.

This card is a fanless GeForce 7000 series (i need a quiet rig for recording music), and i'm thinking that the card just overheated after 2 years of constant use with very infrequent reboots.

Thoughts? Am I way off base here? Thanks guys.

Attached Images

IMG_0547_800x600.JPG (82.9 KB, 6 views)

emosun

Yup , toss it out if it blew it's capacitors. Or you can pay sombody to replace the capacitors , i've seen people here have it done and produce good results. But if it were me I would toss it out and just buy a better card.

thedionysian

thanks for the quick response! Capacitors, there's the word I was searching for. do you think that they blew as a result of the heat, because of the cheapness of the card itself, or because of the PSU?

I guess i'm just trying to figure out how not to have that happen again in the future with a new card.

thanks!

emosun

Those are high quality capacitors so they would only blow out from stress which could be a heat or power problem.

thedionysian

Ok, thanks! I guess i'll have to sacrifice a little bit of silence and get a card with a fan. I'll just move the mic back a few feet i guess.

emosun

Or just put the tower in another room.