My 13 year old son was playing Doom3 the other day when he came rushing in and
said that he smelled something burning (electrical). Now, he thinks the game
is very realistic but he knows that it doesn't include smell so he attempted
to shutdown but his system locked up (hard) before he could.
After I got in the room and did a complete power off/restart, it would boot
back up to a KDE desktop, then moments later, lockup, or spontaneously
shutdown/reboot. All with burnt electrical smell. Then, after a short while,
it got to where it would turn on, but we couldn't even get to BIOS. Now, this
sounds like the power supply is going/gone bad, doesn't it? I've had it
happen before, and his case-P/S combo is about 2-3 years old now, generic
250w, that gets heavy gaming use. So it seemed to fit. I had a spare P/S, so
I replaced it yesterday and tried to boot up. Nada. Same symptoms. Now I was
puzzled. Surely the CPU hasn't fried?-I thought. Well, I happened (thank
goodness for spare parts from past upgrades!) to have a lesser CPU, so I
pulled the suspect CPU and put this one in. Same thing. Same symptoms.
Now I was getting worried. I'm thinking something on the MB (Soyo) had died
and fried. Before I did anything about that though, I did go back and check
all connections, just in case. I pulled his Nvidia Geforce 4 4200 video card
and reseated it. I put a different monitor on his setup, just in case it was
something like that. Well, to make this long story short, I finally stuck his
old video card (a Geforce 2) in there, and it took right off. I put the 4200
back in there, bang-no boot. I examined the fan on the card, blew dust out of
it, cleaned the AGP slot connectors, reinstalled it, and let it sit there.
There is a small black chip in the upper right hand corner of the card that
gets so hot that I can't keep my fingers on it. Its this way just moments
after power hits it. First time for me, a video card burning out. :-(
Does Nvidia repair their cards? If so, is it expensive? Just a thought. It was
a nice card - Geforce 4, Ti4200, 64 megs.
Thanks.
--
/\
Dark< >Lord
\/
____________________________________________________
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
Join the Club : http://www.mandrakeclub.com
____________________________________________________
