How do I tell if something on my PC is dying?

[totemeister]

About a week ago, my system started randomly going to a black screen with the 'No Signal' message, where it would not respond to anything and force my to reboot it.

When it boots up now, where it used to fire up and roar right to life (a couple of big fans) it not makes a series of 16 whirring noises that coincide with the light on the case's drive cover. (When the whir starts, it lights up, when the whir dies the light goes off) It does this series of 16 whirs every time it boots up now, followed by a beep, then firing up as normal.

My system is used for WoW, some older games and most recently, Starcraft 2. Up until a week ago when this started, Starcraft 2 worked fine, now the screen seens to have 'heatwaves' running across it. Does this mean my video cards are going out? I use dual NVidia GeForce 8600 GTS cards.

 

[Rustyy117]

Could possibly be a power supply issue, Could you list your full system spec's including the make and model of your power supply.

 

[Rustyy117]

Dying video card.RMA if under warranty.

You know that for a fact do you?

 

[Rustyy117]

Your telling the OP to RMA his GPU's (if possible), yet you don't know for sure if they are the cause of the problems...

 

[Rustyy117]

Could also be a bad cable or maybe the power supply isn't supplying enough power for the cards. ETC...

 

[totemeister]

Could possibly be a power supply issue, Could you list your full system spec's including the make and model of your power supply.

CPU Type DualCore AMD Athlon 64 X2, 2100 MHz (10.5 x 200) 4000+
Motherboard Name Asus M2N-E SLI (2 PCI, 2 PCI-E x1, 2 PCI-E x16, 4 DDR2 DIMM, Audio, Gigabit LAN, IEEE-1394)

Motherboard Chipset nVIDIA nForce 500 SLI, AMD Hammer
DIMM1: Corsair XMS2 CM2X1024-5400C4 1 GB DDR2-667 DDR2 SDRAM (5-5-5-15 @ 333 MHz) (4-4-4-12 @ 266 MHz)
DIMM2: Corsair XMS2 CM2X1024-5400C4 1 GB DDR2-667 DDR2 SDRAM (5-5-5-15 @ 333 MHz) (4-4-4-12 @ 266 MHz)
Video Adapter NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS (256 MB)
Video Adapter NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS (256 MB)
3D Accelerator nVIDIA GeForce 8600 GTS

Nothing overclocked.

Is there any other information that could be helpful?

My power suuply is a Tagan 800WU25.

Ive had this rig for almost 4 years, and this is the first real issue ive had. Also, it does still do everything as normal except SC2 and the random loss of signal

 

[iam2thecrowe]

no signal can mean you have bad ram, bad motherboard, bad vid card, bad other card (sound card etc) basically any bad component can cause your computer to do this. Hell Ive had a faulty PCI 56k modem cause "no signal" and "no power".

Steps to take to solve your problem.
- try one video card at a time, try one ram module at a time, try another power supply. The initial powering up issue you describe is most likely a PSU issue. It could also be your motherboard on its way out.