Gpu drivers causing blue screen

Status
Not open for further replies.

messaqefrom

Distinguished
Sep 1, 2011
5
0
18,510
I built my first computer just about a year ago and everything has been running perfectly. then a couple of days ago after the hurricane passed by the east coast i lost power. we are lucky enough to have a generator that is good enough to run all our lights and stuff as well as tv's and my dad said it would be okay to have my computer on as well. so i was playing games on my computer because we still had cable and it was working fine. then after about an hour or two i here my dad talking to my mother that he is going to turn off the generator for a little while. i quickly tried to shut it down and run downstairs to stop him because i didn't want him cutting the power while it was on but i believe he turned off the power as it was still ending processes when shutting down and it screwed up my PC.

I hadn't turned my computer on until the next day and to my surprise i was greeted by a blue screen saying i had some kind of problem with my software or hardware. so i booted it up into safe mode and thought that re-installing the drivers might solve the problem. unlucky for me we had lost cable at this point and my cd/dvd drive was not working. so after we finally got cable back i tried re-installing all of the drivers and it seemed to have worked and i booted into normal mode. but it was obvious that there was some problem because it was using the basic windows 7 theme with no transparency which is weird because i use a very nice theme. so i just thought i needed to re-install the gpu drivers again, i found the newest drivers for my gpu online and installed them. sure enough my computer would start get to the "windows starting" screen with the windows logo and then just freeze for awhile and go completely black. i restarted again and it did the same thing and every once in awhile i get the blue screen. so i went back into safe mode and rolled back the driver so that it is just the standard windows vga driver. the computer boots into normal mode fine and everything is working except the gpu it seems.

i just wanted to make sure that my gpu is the problem before i replace it. is there any way i can test to make sure that the motherboard, ram, and psu are all working properly? I am a little confused because i removed the gpu to look at it and tried to run the computer using the vga port on the back of the motherboard and it would not output to the monitor but when i have the gpu still in and i hook up the monitor to its dvi port it will still output video just not have the power that it used to when using the drivers. also i just wanted to point out that when booting up the bios screen has some weird lines going across it. i'm not sure if they were always there because i usually just put my computer to sleep or walk away while it boots up but i don't recall them ever being there before.

System Specs

Operating System
MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
CPU
Intel Core i7 870 @ 2.93GHz 38 °C
Lynnfield 45nm Technology
RAM
8.00 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 531MHz (7-7-7-20)
Motherboard
ASUSTeK Computer INC. P7H55-M PRO (LGA1156) 40 °C
Graphics
Generic Non-PnP Monitor (1280x800@1Hz)
MSI N460GTX Hawk Talon Attack GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 1GB
Hard Drives
244GB Seagate ST3250310AS ATA Device (SATA) 38 °C
Optical Drives
TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-H653B ATA Device
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio
 
Sometimes the latest video driver is not the solution. On my i7-920 computer, I had all kinds of problems when I updated the Nvidia video driver. I re-installed the older driver and things were perfect!

I thought that I should share this info with you.
 

messaqefrom

Distinguished
Sep 1, 2011
5
0
18,510
yeah i understand that sometimes the drivers don't work but i had my system running for more than six months with the driver that came with the card and i tried installing the same one and it did the same thing. i have no problem getting a new video card i just want to be sure that that is the problem before i get it, so if you have any other ideas of what could be causing this problem please share.
 

messaqefrom

Distinguished
Sep 1, 2011
5
0
18,510
No i believe this to be a strictly hardware problem i have tried many different drivers and i also tried re-installing windows and trying the default drivers again and it still does not work. is there any chance it could be a problem with the motherboard or some other component? i even updated my motherboard bios and every other driver that needed updating and it worked fine in normal mode. but as soon as i install the graphics card driver it wont load windows.
 

messaqefrom

Distinguished
Sep 1, 2011
5
0
18,510
Lucky enough for me my uncle was giving away an old computer of his and i was able to take the gpu out of it and use it in my computer. all of my problems went away instantly so the gpu was the problem. i will be ordering a new card very shortly so i can get back to my games. thanks for all your help and support i will be back if i have any more questions.
 

Ferretmyster

Distinguished
Jan 5, 2012
17
0
18,510
It may have been your motherboard being cooked when the power went out. Same thing happened to me and it damaged one of the units in my motherboard, connecting to my graphics card. I turned on my computer and it worked fine. But when I played a game all the textures were purple and the performance dropped by alot. I got the Motherboard replaced and got a blue screen on start up. Tried again and it worked. But it didn't fix the problem, so I opened AMD catalyst and noticed that all of my settings were turned all the way down and disabled. Turned them back on and maxed and everything is good. Except since then I have gotten 29 Blue Screens, but I don't think its to do with the hardware. I think it might be the drivers, because I got 3 drivers since then.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.