7800GT Woes

[garyhott]

I seem to be having a problem with my video card...however, I'm not 100% sure that it IS the video card.

My system specs: (for reference)....2 years old :(
Raidmax Ninja-918 ATX Case
Enermax 535-Watt SLI Ready PSU
939-Pin AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU (Single Core)
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium nForce 4 PCI-Express MOBO
1GB DDR400 PC3200 Memory Corsair XMS w/ Heat Spreader
PCI-E nVidia Geforce 7800GT 256MB Video Card
160GB Western Digital HD
16X DVD-Rom
16X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD +-R/+-RW + CD-R/RW
3.5" Floppy Drive

Now here is a quick rundown of the problem, and some troubleshooting that I have attempted so far:

Whats happening is, sometimes when I do a complete shut down, and try to reboot by using the power button on the front of the case, the monitor will not show anything. The PC is booting...fans come on, lights come on, everything SEEMS to be running (and has power), but I get no video. So, sometimes, I have to turn the PC off and back on several times to get everything working, and sometimes, it works on the first try.

Now whats weird to me is, if I just do a restart from Windows, it will come back every time. That is, if I do not shut down completely....just do a Start, Shutdown, Restart, it works just like it should.

Another weird thing is that sometimes if I completely shut the PC down....and I try using the power button on the front of the case. If I don't push the power switch in all the way to where it "clicks", the PC seems to be more succeptable to boot from just pressing the power button far enough to where it turns the PC on. Not sure if my description makes sense....but this has me thinking that maybe something is up with the power switch.

Trouble shooting I have attempted so far:

- The video card has two ports for monitors...I've tried those both.

- I've tried removing the video card, cleaning the slot, pins, and video card and then disconnecting and reconnecting the connector in the rear of the card then putting it back into the same slot.

- The Asus A8N SLI Premium has two 16x PCI-E slots, so I tried moving the video card to the second slot.

- Lastly, I removed all the memory from the slots on the MOBO and booting.

Nothing has worked.

What I plan to try this evening/tomorrow:

- Removing the memory, hard drive, CD/DVD Drives, floppy drives, and anything else from the MOBO and just booting with the PSU and Video card to see if that works.

- I have a friend who has a PCI-E SLI motherboard. If nothing else works, I am going to take my video card out and give it to him so he can try it out on his motherboard.

It seems to be 1 of 3 problems to me...bad motherboard (not very likely IMO), weirded out power switch (also not very likely IMO), or bad video card (the most likely culprit as of right now).

For reference, I searched and found this thread. Seems to be close to the same problem that I'm having:

http://www.pcguide.com/vb/showthread.php?t=55116&highlight=7800gt

Thanks for your time, and I apologize for this long post.

[mjc]

I would order the likelihood of the actual cause of the problem being something like this...

1. Power supply problem.
2. Switch problem.
3. Video card itself.
4. BIOS setting...make sure that powering off by the switch is actually powering off and not some sort of 'sleep' or hibernation...
5. Bad CMOS battery
6. Any combination of the above.

[garyhott]

Just tried a few more things.

Unplugged and removed everything from the motherboard and tried to boot with only the video card...still acted the same.

Then I switched the Power Supply connector from the back of the video card. This seemed to yield better results.

After switching connectors, the video didn't show twice out of 15 times. Usually, it would be greater than half.

The power switch still has my attention however. Both powering on by not pushing it in all the way, and also pushing it in all the way...will NOT stay consistent. This seems odd, but now that I've switched connectors, it seems as if though pushing the button in all the way works more than not now.

Still planning on getting a friend to test out the video card tomorrow.

Anyone have any input as far as what I could try in the mean time?

[mjc]

Swap the leads for the reset and power buttons on your case...

[garyhott]

Planning on swapping the leads for power/reset buttons tonight and doing some more testing. MJC, I didn't read your above post the other night before I shut down...didn't think about doing that.

Gave the card to a friend yesterday to test out and he said that it worked flawlessly on his machine.

Also, looked everywhere in the BIOS to see if everything looked normal....no weird Sleep or Hibernation settings, no weird video settings...nothing of that sort.

I'm guessing now that it's the power switch, PSU, or MOBO. Hopefully I'll be able to slowly narrow this down.

MJC, I appreciate all your help so far!

[garyhott]

Update...

I tried swapping the leads for the power/reset buttons...acted the same.

Also, a friend let me borrow a completely different power switch...tried that and it still acted the same.

I guess the next step will be to swap out the PSU. Not sure what else it could be other than the PSU...

[saphalline]

How old is your BIOS version?