Is it my PSU or Video card that is flaky?

[WackyDan]

Hardware, older IBM Netvista tower P4 2.66 running an ATI 9550 AGP card.

System has been running absolutely perfect for the last year or so since I put it in service. It was a system I bought that was off lease used. I added the ATI 9550 so I could run dual display with a bit better graphics.... The system is only used for general office type apps/Internet.... no games.

Anyhoo..... Get home last night and fire up the machine, and shortly there after the screen freaks out - artifacts, and then I get the ATI VPU recover pop up dialog. mouse and key board seem to lock, but I think that's either the video output borking my KVM or the fact that the screen isn't refreshing.

After rebooting I get about 5 minutes tops of use before it gets borked again, and the VPU recover notice pops up, and on this last time I got a Display driver error.

I'm going to pull the system and check the fan on the video card, remove the card, and try running the system off the Intel integrated graphics for a while.

The only odd thing I've gotten is my CA firewall is saying its discovering a new network when I reboot.... which is odd.

So.....PSU going bad or maybe video card? If it's the video card, I can buy another ATI card of the similar series and it will use the same driver?

 

[Muse]

My first thought would be that the fan on the video card had died.

 

[imported_AndyT]

A PSU will most often just die. They generally don't start going bad and usually die with a puff of burnt components.

Your video card and possibly the motherboard are suspect. As the last poster said, check the fan first and you might swap an old video card in to see how that works if your fan is fine.

The motherboard could have some capacitors going bad. I have had this happen to a system in the past and it caused similar problems.

Good luck!

 

[WackyDan]

Hmmm... No fan on the video card, but heatsink was loose. Only held on by springs and plastic clips.

I removed the heat sink, cleaned off the GPU and heat sink. applied artic silver, and reinstalled.

We'll see if that was the core issue or not.... I'm posting from the affected machine now....

Thanks for the input guys.

 

[WackyDan]

Well..... Seems to have been the issue. Machine would have crashed by now if it wasn't. Couldn't believe the amount of heat sink compound they had on there either,,, I think that's why the heat sink was slipping around so much on it.