Computanoob

Prominent
Mar 6, 2020
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this enigmatic mystery is about some older hardware so please dont be an elitist and bear with me,
I5 4400 Gigabyte g1 sniper radeon HD 6970

I did a dumb thing and checked my PC very wwell packed on an airplane ith tons of bubble wrap and packing peanuts. It might have been something pushing on the GPU becuase I packed padding inside the case, but when I set everything up and turned it on I got a black screen or no signal on monitor. By using shft wind B or whatever and ctrl alt del and resetting bio from motherboard I as able to get into the BIOS finally. I was some boots able to go into windows, but when I did, i ended up with a pixelated screen, a "graphics driver stopped working" message," but it's been resolved " and then more pixels, a freeze and a blue or black screen. a little after. Then lots of boots with nothing.

This whole time my board is giving me a good debug LED message and all the rbg looks normal. I tried display from the MOBO and sometimes it sort of worked but there appeared a conflict between the board and the mobo display output causing stuttering or issues.

Finally I reset windows, did a factory reset of the PC and then my screen did not match the size of monitor, but no more issues. THEN hen I installed the most current drivers the screen scaled to the monitor AND the pixelaton crash started again. I tried using DVI and HDMI, multiple monitors, multiple cables, and I swapped the PCI slot the GPU is in. I swapped ram configurations and used completely different ram and reset the CMOS a bunch more. Then I reinstalled windows again.

Also I took out the GPU completely and ran some medieval 2 total war wiwth my build in board graphics via that output port. Actually ran super smooth and pretty!!!!

I dissasembled and inspected/cleaned the GPU and reinstalled using the DVI cable.
Now heres the weird part (at least to me) First boot The screen started locking up wiwth pixels and the driver crash error message again on my most current windows reset. So I went into device manager and disabled my GPU. Boom everything works normal. Now the odd thing is I'm still using my computer to type this even though my GPU is disabled, and the output port is on my GPU. The on board port is currently not connected to anything. The GPU fan is also still running. Howw is that possible? If I disabled the GPU would the fan still be running in zombie mode? I'm still getting display.

Anyway I am pretty certain at this point it is definately either th GPU or related drivers, but if anyone else has an idea let me know. I had not really changed anything and everything was working fine before the flight, so I'm wondering if radiation fried a chip or seomthing or mechanical damage(none obvious)

other things i've susp[ected are the PSU cables to the GPU, the monitor handshake(if that even happens) and initially I thought the hardrive, but literally everything rtuns fine when the GPU is disconnected or disabled
I got this GPU for 20 bucks used and it ran well for 6 months. I wont be heartbroken, just want to make sure that's what it is
Thanks for any input
Dan
 
Solution
if you load the GPU driver and your computer start crashing, my guess is it's a faulty GPU (especially after you played on your iGPU and everything was smooth).
Sep 15, 2020
17
3
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if you load the GPU driver and your computer start crashing, my guess is it's a faulty GPU (especially after you played on your iGPU and everything was smooth).
 
Solution