Gainward ti4600 craziness....please help.

[Rivian11]

specs are as follows
1.6a, p4s533, santa cruz sound card, gainward ti4600 golden sample, corsair xms 3200 512 meg ddr.
2 hdd's, one 40xcdrw, 3 case fans. antec 350w ps.

I was having a bunch of problems with my system for couple days after I built it. No signal if I tried to run my system above 133mhz bus(2.133ghz)....even by 1mhz. So I said fine, ill let it stay there. Came back a week later from camp and my system was still running, so i was happy. 2 days later, i have a lan party at my house where it works fine for 24 hours.

I simply move the thing back to my room upstairs, it does not work AT ALL. It appears like the gainward card is the culprit, but im not sure. I tried booting it about 15 times, I got a signal once, straight to the bios. After reboot, no signal. I tried an old savage 4 video card, booted 3/3 times no problem. I then tried my ti4600 after disconnecting 3 fans and one hd. No change.
I also tried pulling out the battery.........no change.
I then tried my ti4600 in my dads athlon system, thinking somehow it died, and it booted fine. What does that mean? I have no clue.
sometimes ive left it running for 5 minutes with no signal, to come back to it in the bios. a restart will result in the same thing......no signal.

I called gainward tech support. "You tried a different motherboard? You tried a different video card? I have no idea. This makes no sense. Lets try RMAing it."
Anyone?

 

[Actaeon]

Welcome to Anandtech BBS...

Okay.... lets narrow down the problem.

Your card works in another system, and it booted fine, Did it get any farther than that? Could you play games or run 3d applications on it? If so, then its not the Videocard.
So, that would suggest a problem in your PC correct? Not quite... you said you ran an old Savage 4 Videocard, and it booted 3/3 times with no problems.
So what is it? I would normally suggest your Powersupply isn't giving enough power to feed the Videocard, But your powersupply does looks powerful enough.

So, I narrowed down the problems to this.

Is everything in your computer properly seated? Sounds like when you were moving it upstairs, something must have slipped out of there slots a little.

Another suggestion would be, don't have anything in the top PCI slot by the AGP port. I'm not sure about your Mobo, but some motherboards make the AGP slot, and the 1st PCI port share the same IRQ. Move it to another slot, and see if it runs.

Lastly, If none of the above doesn't work, I suggest you run a barebone setup, just the CPU/Mobo, Videocard. take out all your PCI cards, network cards, soundcards, and blah.

If your CPU boots up fine there, then it sounds like a hardware conflict of some type between your Gainward and something else.


Hope this helps!
Jonathan

 

[Rivian11]

i tried that, to no avail...