Display problems, I'm thinking power supply is the culprit, but I'm a newbie

[fool2]

This is my first time building a computer or altering the components within one. I tool my old HP P7-1003W and decided to make it an HTPC. I am not terribly concerned with gaming, but I did want a graphics card for 1080p signal through an HDMI. I actually wanted dual HDMI's so I could run HDMI sound to a stereo receiver, which I haven't done yet. Anyway here's what it has.

N-Alvorix-RS880-uATX (Alvorix) (Stock, never heard of it)
AMD Athlon II X4 650 (Stock)
4x 4gb DDR3-1333 (Half was stock)
3x 3.5" 7500 HDD's (One was stock)
Sony BluRay drive (new)
Corsair CX430 (New)
GeForce GTX 750 Ti Black Edition (New)

I added the components little by little, but as soon as I added the GPU I got an occasional black flicker on my display. It was rare, and it seemed to happen when I was doing something like maximizing a video or changing the volume or something. I also got an error message on boot up that said "Warning: The AMD VISION Engine Control Center is not supported by the driver version of your enabled graphics adapter. Please update your AMD Graphics Driver, or enable your AMD adapter using the Displays Manager"

At the time I thought it was because I downloaded the drivers online and possibly got something wrong, so when the BluRay drive was installed I immediately installed the drivers on the disc that came with the GPU. Nothing changed. Then I went into BIOS to change the graphics settings, but they were already set to the PCI slot. But things were still running okay, with the flicker only happening rarely.

I continued adding components, including hard drives. And today I was performing some data recovery on an external that went bad, and when I installed it internally and started moving data from one HDD to the other, the flickering got REALLY bad. To the point I thought I was going to lose display completely. At that time I discovered sound was being cut out too for that moment long flicker of black screen. It seems like the additional two hard drives have really made the flickering more frequent.

So I tried all the trouble shooting I could, and right now I'm down to either I STILL have bad drivers/bad install, the GPU just isn't any good, or I didn't upgrade the power source well enough. Before I spend another $60 on another brand new power source I thought I'd ask some opinions here, maybe see if there's something I haven't tried yet, or if the fix is something completely different. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

 

[kwa-e]

Try sweeping all of your graphics drivers with this driver sweeper and download the latest drivers from Nvidia's website. Remnants of old ATI or Radeon drivers can often cause problems, and I do not recommend using the drivers from the disk that came with the card as the drivers are often outdated.

 

[fool2]

Hi, thanks for the tip! I went ahead and went back to the drivers on the website. Not sure if they're any different or not, I'm still getting that error at startup.

I half solved my problem. As I was fooling around with my computer it shocked me, so I swapped out the surge suppressor. It made the black flicker go from terribly frequent to the same rare occurrence it was at first. Luckily I did that before all my electronics were fried, or my house burned down. But now I'm back where I was at the beginning. I no longer think it's a power supply issue. I think I have something configured wrong, but can't figure out what.

 

[fool2]

Okay, it seems the more I troubleshoot the worse things get. I ran Driver Sweeper, I reinstalled the latest driver through GeForce Experience. I still get the same warning at startup, I still get the occasional black screen flash, but now I also get very VERY frequent loss of sound for a couple seconds. I've troubleshot online for the past several hours and done everything recommended. Nothing works. I've tried using a different cable for audio, I've fiddled with all the sound settings. Nothing is working. Sound is interrupted on content on my hard drive as well as streaming content from sites like Youtube. It's frequent enough that I can't even watch a movie right now.

 

[fool2]

Here's a screencap of the warning I get at startup and my sound options. The Realtek output currently chosen in the screencap gets no sound, the Sanyo option above it does, but with the frequent interruptions. Also, I was not getting those interruptions just yesterday, and am not sure what I did to make them happen.

 

[fool2]

I completely deleted all AMD software and it got rid of the warning at startup, but sound is still cutting out. Video display seems to be fixed, which is great, but audio is really bad. It seems to be worse when viewing video from my hard drive rather than streaming online, but happens while doing both. I've tried multiple websites for streaming, and it happens rarely. While viewing video from my hard drive I tried several video files and two different media players with the same terrible results. This was not happening yesterday by the way.

I am running audio to the TV through the HDMI out on the GPU, which I read is supposed to work fine, and has been working fine. I turned off the 3.5 audio jack in front and back in case it was causing interference, I went into the sound settings and tried just about every option I could think of. I disabled the Realtek Digital Audio and still the problem persists. When I keep the volume control open while watching a video I can see the little sound indicator bar is working, so the computer knows sound is supposed to be happening, but it's not coming out of the speakers.

 

[kwa-e]

You might have accidentally swept and uninstalled your Realtek Audio Drivers

Try downloading and the audio drivers from Realtek's website.

My apologies for not elaborating on which drivers to and not to sweep on the Sweeper program.

 

[fool2]

I did erase the Realtek drivers. I downloaded them again today, although I'm not using them. If they don't cause an interference then I might as well have them just in case something happens to the GPU.

Also, I think the problem is solved. I don't know what solved it, a combination of deleting and reinstalling drivers I think, but I haven't had a screen flicker or sound cut out all day today and I've been testing on multiple media players as well as streaming. All seems to be fine now. Thanks for the help.