Bronxbomber

Hi - Having a strange problem with my video card and wanted to see if someone else has experienced this.

I have a BFG6800GT OC 256MB PCI-E card on an Asus P5AD2-E Premium mobo. Every morning when I go to power the PC on, the video card does not activate (it is not getting power; it has a led that does not light, and the GPU fan does not spin). The rest of the PC gets power - the hard drives and DVD drives spin up, but the PC doesn't seem to post (no beeps or anything). After about 10-15 hard resets, suddenly the video card powers on (the led lights and the GPU fan spins), but the PC still gets no video. Then after about two to three more hard resets, the PC posts with two quick beeps, and on the very next reset it powers up with video and all, and remains fine for the entire day, which could be 12 hours or more.

The PC is my second PC, and is kept in a sunroom. However, we shut down the heat in the room to save energy and money, and when I go to power on that PC every morning the room is approximately 50-60F. Can it be too cold for the video card or PC? If not, I'm thinking I either have a bad PSU (a 500W Antec Smartpower 2.0), or a bad mobo, or video card. My main PC has two 7800GTXs in SLI, so I suppose I could put one of those in it to see what happens the next morning, probably my next step.

Also - it seems that my mobo loses its saved settings when this happens. features that I had disabled (like 2nd Gigabit Ethernet) are suddenly enabled, etc. And my manual RAM timings are wiped out and are enabled by SPD (my guess is mobo is loading factory defaults after double-beep post).



Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thanks!

Tumbleweed36

Hi,

I just don' think the temps you are saying about the room indicate that this is the problem. I would look for three possible problems:

1) Take out the video card and clean the bottom prong insert area with 94+ Alcohol. Reseat and retry. Make sure it snaps clear down in the slot.

2) Try a new connector cable from the PS to the card assuming you have that connector.

3) This might be the real kicker. You mentioned "two quick beeps" which could very likely indicate a memory problem. Therefore, I would first of all, take out one stick (if you have two) and try it, then take that one out and try the other one. Next, I would run memtest on this computer: http://www.memtest86.com/

4) Last, but not least, if you are losing settings, you probably need to replace your battery. That might be worth your time to do that one.

Note: Be careful about running your video card without the fan running for any period of time.

Volt-Schwibe

i have seen this exact problem myself.

not sure if the cause is the same, but here's what fixed it for us....

in the bios, there is a setting for AGP 4x/8x. we changed it down to 4x and the problem went away.

(and the 4x change made no noticable difference in the way games run)

keymaker

the problem could be the videocard indeed. you can try testing a spare power supply to see if its a videocard issue. good luck

jonan

I had exactly the same problem.
I bought my computer in the summer and it booted up every morning with no trouble...until the nights began to get colder, and overnight the computer room is not heated,..and then it would not boot up unless I switched it off and on repeatedly.
This got worse and worse as the nights got colder.
I changed the motherboard and PSU and neither change made any difference, if fact the error beeps indicated a video fault.
The manufacurer was willing to take it back but I had a feeling something odd was going on and I doubted if they were any wiser than I was at that time.
The problem was solved by switching on a small fan heater aimed at the PC for a few minutes before I start it in the morning.
The video card, Nvidia 6800GT,seems to be very low temperature sensitve and just refuses to "exist" below a certain temperature..no fan running, no output to monitor,no nothing..so giving it a little warm up is all that is needed.

The machine runs beautifully apart from that so I will just put up with the minor inconvenience of the preheating..unless someone comes up with better solution!I preheat my cars engine, so why not my computer!
jonan

Lectraplayer

Another suggestion is to simply leave the computer running at all times. Computers tend to not require that much power when they remain at idle. You can also turn down the clock speed if it makes you feel better.