Computer not recognizing video card

[sa230e]

Hey everybody,

I'm having a really strange problem with my computer. I've been running pretty much the same setup which has been working fine for a few years now but I recently added an SSD and a 1TB hard drive to it and did a reformat. Everything went fine until I shut it down and restarted it after installing drivers.

The computer seems to "forget" it has a video card installed (it does, it's an Asus Geforce GTX 660 OC edition 2GB). It boots into windows at 800x600 resolution. In device manager, not only does the video card NOT show up, the whole "graphics adaptors" category doesn't show up! Strangely I can still see (low res) video on my monitor.

And then sometimes if you reboot the machine, it'll work. The video card shows up, I get high resolution and everything's fine but if I put the machine to sleep or restart, it's gone!

I tried reseating the video card and it still happens.

I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers but I couldn't reinstall because the video card was not detected.

I tried using a different video card and the same problem seems to happen with that card so it seems to be a hardware problem.

But for the sake of thoroughness I reformatted again with a fresh copy of windows in case I seriously screwed something up with the drivers or system files. I reinstalled the drivers and it worked... until I rebooted and I was back to the same issue.

I actually managed to get it to work for a little while today and I used it for a while, did some gaming even, until the system crashed. I restarted it and now the graphics card doesn't show up again.

Here's the specs
-Intel Core 2 Duo Q6600 2.4Ghz
-6GB DDR2 800 RAM
-EVGA 780i chipset motherboard
-Asus Geforce GTX 660 OC edition 2GB
-120GB Samsung SSD
-120GB Western Digital Raptor HD
-500GB Seagater HD
-1TB Western Digital HD
-750W Silverstone PSU

Anybody know what could be going on?

Thank you in advance!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Yeah, the board is dying. Especially if you tested with two different video cards, and it happened with both of them. Therefore, it's not the card, it's the board. I would have blamed the CPU or LGA socket if it had been a newer CPU, but on 775-era CPUs, the PCI-E lanes are on the northbridge chipset, and not on the CPU like they are on newer platforms.

So, your chipset / board is dying. (There is an off chance it could be the PSU too, but I would expect that if the PSU was bad enough that two different video cards weren't recognized, then you would be having other problems besides, as well. Namely, storage issues too.)

Edit: PS., that board is ancient, an upgrade is due anyways.

 

[xthetenth]

On the plus side, you're in for a huge cpu/motherboard upgrade if you go for a platform replacement.