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Computer crapped out on me today

F

futurefields

Diamond Member
Today about 5 mins after booting up my PC I was browsing the Steam store when all the sudden my monitor went black and had a bunch of garbled junk on it, like scan lines or something. I thought my GPU had died. I just powered it off, and then back on. And it was back to normal.

Anybody know what could have caused that?
 
Was there a quick blue screen? If not, could have been memory or the video card. Anything overclocked?
 
The scan lines make me think it could be the video ports. Can you try another port on the card if possible ? Did it turn off or reboot on it's own? Or the monitor just stayed like that ? My brothers alienware did that once and it was due to the crappy gtx555 could not use the latest nvidia drivers properly. But his pc would just blue screen after freezing.
 
Future occurrences might lead to an idea of what the problem is. I think it is going to be pretty hard to tell after just one.
 
Monitor your task manager and see if anything is running that could be using too much memory. What were you doing when this happened ?
 
that kind of problem can be caused by a lot of things.. including someone in your house running a hair dryer and you without a UPS to level your power browns.
 
Something is unstable could be ram maybe going bad? Or possible your gpu just had a hiccup. Install latest drivers and I guess wait and see what happens. You would need to replicate the issue I suppose to rule out certain components.

Seeing as the pc was still on and only the monitor got scan lines on it makes me think one of the dvi ports may be going bad on your card. See if it happens again and if you have another port to use try that one too.
 
futurefields said:
I don't have a UPS on my computer, but I do have it hooked into one of these which I think should stop power surges:

http://www.tripplite.com/en/products/model.cfm?txtModelID=3980
Click to expand...

surges and browns are 2 different things entirely.

your psu can accept a voltage range of rougly 85v-125v unless u have a self switching, which can take anywhere from 85v-230v.

the problem tho is if someone runs a hair dryer or a power hungry appliance in your house and dips the voltage below 85V.

it doesnt need to be continuous... it could be even for 1 sec.
At that moment, your PSU can not provide the required power and will cause all sorts of failure.

Which is why i said its very hard to diagnose because it could of been a hair dryer.. or a bad transformer... or something on the power end.. and not your PC end.
 
Another thing to try is to swap out your video cable, as well as attempting to hook the monitor up to another port.
 
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