Crashed in a game, no more signal from GPU.

[rinleezwins]

AMD Phenom II 560 BE
MSI Radeon HD6850
Sapphire 760G2 AM3+ mobo
OCZ StealthXstream 700W
Windows 7 64bit

I've had this quite old setup running flawlessly for years, periodically monitoring temperatures and thoroughly cleaning all the components. Today, just like any other time I took the PC apart, cleaned everything and put it back together exactly the way I always did. Then I went to play a not so demanding game with fps capped at 60, GPU temperatures around 60-70 degrees, while CPU in the 50-60 range, no overclocking whatsoever.

Suddenly, my screen turns black, the audio hangs up so I rebooted the pc manually just to find out that I am no longer getting any signal on my monitor. Everything sounds fine, no beeps from mobo, all the fans are spinning like they always are, nothing unusual except for the fact that I am getting no video.

I tried connecting the monitor to the integrated gpu and surprisingly it worked, but only after I unplugged the radeon from the pci-e slot. I tried resetting the BIOS to fail-safe defaults, I tried changing the gpu order and disabling the integrated gpu, but I just can't get any signal from the radeon at all.

Could the radeon just suddenly fail and smoke itself without showing any signs of aging? Could this be an advanced power issue? I suspected motherboard at first, but the integrated gpu works so I guess that's not the issue. Could it actually be driver-related? Sounds more like a hardware issue to me, since the problem occurs as soon as I power on the pc.

I am losing my mind here trying to figure out what the problem might be, especially given the fact that I just took apart the entire system and I can't stop wondering if it's just a coincidence or maybe I could have made some stupid mistake.

I have probably tried other things that I forgot to mention in this posts, but I will be forever grateful for any ideas and help.

 

[CountMike]

Wouldn't be first that went belly up !!! Driver related wouldn't stop it from booting to BIOS. If you try reseating card and power plugs and trying in another PCIe slot than only trying other card or that one in another computer is the way to test.

 

[rinleezwins]

I already tried reseating and replugging multiple times, I only have 1 PCI-E slot on my motherboard. Currently I suspect either the PCI-E slot or the GPU itself.

Sadly I won't be able to test the GPU in another system or another GPU in my system for a good few days and the damn weekend just started... Another interesting thing is, apart from the GPU fan spinning, the GPU itself is actually heating up, that should mean it's working to some extent?

It really bothers me that I'm getting no image when I set the onboard gpu as default and the radeon is still plugged in. The only way to get the onboard gpu to work is unplugging the card.

 

[rinleezwins]

I dont know if the motherboard would detect the GPU in the slot if it's not connected to the PSU, but I can hear windows boot this way. As soon as I plug the 6pin cable to the GPU, windows doesn't boot. My USB mouse and keyboard don't even light up. My PSU has 2 6pin power cabled and I tried b oth.