• Please Help – Completely Lost

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    #488427

    Hello all, I desperately need some troubleshooting help. I’m afraid of my own diagnosis but want some other opinions. I have an Asus P4P800-E Deluxe custom built computer that is going on probably 6 -7 years old. I have had an intermittent problem with the video for some time now that generally has been resolved by me removing and re-seating the video card or wiggling it in its slot or wiggling the DVI cable. The problem being that when I power on the system I will get a normal POST beep but no video. As I mentioned above before this issue was resolved by wiggling/re-seating the video card and/or DVI cable and then the system would boot up normally with video and all. I can reboot the system multiple times with no issues but once in a blue moon I would get this no video issue.

    This time however no joy. When I boot the system I will get a normal POST beep and usually a 1 – 1.5 sec flash of video, long enough to see the start of the POST screen. Then the video will go blank BUT I still have a normal video indication from my monitor as if it is getting a good video signal. The video will then flash again for about a second to a second and a half during the XP Boot screen and then go blank again. If I wait for a minute or two and power off the monitor and turn it back on I will get a second or two of the Windows XP Logon screen and then the screen goes blank again. I have removed and re-seated the card at least 10 times now. I have changed out the DVI cable to a known good one. I have switched over to the VGA cable. I have tried a different AGP card and also a PCI video card and all three cards give me the exact same result.

    The only thing I did different tonight was change out the two exhaust fans on the back of the case and the power cables got tangled up a bit but as far as I can tell no connections to the motherboard have been disconnected or come loose. I pressed on each one to make sure that they were plugged in securely. As this has been an ongoing issue for quite some time that just happened to resolve itself I am inclined to believe that the motherboard has failed. I have not swapped out monitors as I don’t believe that the monitor is the culprit but hell, I’ve certainly been wrong before.

    I’m going to call it a night before I attempt to fix it with a .45 ACP but any suggestions or advice would be greatly appreciated.

    Thanks so much,

    Val

    Update…

    Well, just to make sure I had all of my bases covered I decided to switch out the monitor with an old VGA monitor I had laying around. Lo and Behold…worked like a charm….LOL…

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    • #1382562

      Aw, I read all the way through to find out you already know the problem. As soon as I saw that an AGP AND PCI video card returned the exact same results…monitor. That’s a very good diagnostic by the way, not sure I would have thought of it; I should see if I have any old PCI cards lying around since I occasionally have video problems on systems.

    • #1382566

      Yeah, that was a good self system diagnosis. You covered all the bases nicely.

    • #1383773

      I agree with the other posters.

      I used to work on commercial sound systems and drive-thru systems and I always tried to find something common when troubleshooting. In your case it was the monitor. I would not be surprised if was actually the connecting cable.

    • #1385510

      🙂 Thank you guys for your replies. I’m sorry F.U.N. that I made you read all the way before finding out that I had figured it out. It was only like 5 minutes after I posted that that I decided to make sure it wasn’t the monitor. I should’ve put that in at the top somehow. Nate, I agree with you. I have found that 99% of the time the cable is the culprit and that was actually the first thing I swapped out. Again, thank you guys for your replies. This community is imho the best out there.

      Val

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