Intel Q6600 Core2Quad
ASRock P43Twins1600
GTX 550Ti
6GB DDR2 (2+2+1+1)
Windows 7 x64
I can't remember the PSU brand, but it was supposed to be a good one. It's 750 anyway.
Sorry for the abundance of text, but I should explain the problem...
So, a few weeks before Christmas my PC (or a part or parts of it at least) died a painful death; it had sporadically rebooted/shut itself down a couple of times, so I knew something was amiss. At first I just assumed it was the CPU or my old graphics card (GTS 250) overheating, but eventually I booted the PC up and although some of the normal text on the POST screen was displayed, there were distorted grey lines/smudges at the bottom of the screen. One of my friends told me over Steam that it was probably my PSU failing, and the grey lines were the result of the card being underpowered.
I left things for a few weeks, though I had planned on getting a new card anyway, so I bought a GTX 550 Ti on Amazon last week as it was very good value and I thought that even if the problem was the PSU, they're not too expensive to replace and I could use the new card anyway. So I installed it earlier with a couple of 1GB sticks of RAM (just to test, as I know one of the 2GB sticks has been playing up) and it booted up fine... I downloaded the latest NVIDIA drivers and shut down the PC to install some Windows updates, but during the last update (#14) the screen went black - which made me think that it had maybe installed some sort of graphics driver (which Windows likes to download automatically, despite me having already manually installed one) and then it shut down about 15 seconds later.
At this point I then put in my other two sticks of RAM and booted up the PC, but it was just black (the monitor didn't register, and hasn't since it went off before it shut down after installing the Windows updates); I tried turning it off (PSU switch) and on again a few times, each time trying different combinations of RAM (sometimes just one of the 1GB sticks, which definitely worked earlier today) but I never got anything on the monitor - the little blue light just kept flashing, indicating that there was no signal from the GPU.
So, nothing... my PC worked earlier today for about an hour, and then it died again after either changing the RAM or installing an update (which would be my guess, as I can't think why the display signal would have cut out afterwards) and so I'm now back to square one.
With all this in mind, is the PSU the likely culprit?
After this I tried
ASRock P43Twins1600
GTX 550Ti
6GB DDR2 (2+2+1+1)
Windows 7 x64
I can't remember the PSU brand, but it was supposed to be a good one. It's 750 anyway.
Sorry for the abundance of text, but I should explain the problem...
So, a few weeks before Christmas my PC (or a part or parts of it at least) died a painful death; it had sporadically rebooted/shut itself down a couple of times, so I knew something was amiss. At first I just assumed it was the CPU or my old graphics card (GTS 250) overheating, but eventually I booted the PC up and although some of the normal text on the POST screen was displayed, there were distorted grey lines/smudges at the bottom of the screen. One of my friends told me over Steam that it was probably my PSU failing, and the grey lines were the result of the card being underpowered.
I left things for a few weeks, though I had planned on getting a new card anyway, so I bought a GTX 550 Ti on Amazon last week as it was very good value and I thought that even if the problem was the PSU, they're not too expensive to replace and I could use the new card anyway. So I installed it earlier with a couple of 1GB sticks of RAM (just to test, as I know one of the 2GB sticks has been playing up) and it booted up fine... I downloaded the latest NVIDIA drivers and shut down the PC to install some Windows updates, but during the last update (#14) the screen went black - which made me think that it had maybe installed some sort of graphics driver (which Windows likes to download automatically, despite me having already manually installed one) and then it shut down about 15 seconds later.
At this point I then put in my other two sticks of RAM and booted up the PC, but it was just black (the monitor didn't register, and hasn't since it went off before it shut down after installing the Windows updates); I tried turning it off (PSU switch) and on again a few times, each time trying different combinations of RAM (sometimes just one of the 1GB sticks, which definitely worked earlier today) but I never got anything on the monitor - the little blue light just kept flashing, indicating that there was no signal from the GPU.
So, nothing... my PC worked earlier today for about an hour, and then it died again after either changing the RAM or installing an update (which would be my guess, as I can't think why the display signal would have cut out afterwards) and so I'm now back to square one.
With all this in mind, is the PSU the likely culprit?
After this I tried