[mdlug] Seeking advice or at least commiseration

[Ingles, Raymond]

Have had a good, stable system for three years now. Decided to upgrade the video card so I could hang onto the system for another three years.

Replaced an Nvidia GTX 560 Ti with a GTX 970  two and a half weeks ago. No problems at first, games ran faster in Linux and Windows. Over the weekend, the computer locked up a couple times in games, and I had to power-cycle once or twice to get it to POST. BIOS said "Overclocking failure" - but I don't overclock anything. Googling a bit, it seems that message comes up from power fluctuations sometimes.

I updated the MB to the latest BIOS last night, and got things running. Worked for a while, then I gamed for about an hour, and got a hard crash. And now the computer won't POST at all. I can power the system on, and the fans spin up and so forth, the HD activity light comes on briefly, etc. But no video signal at all to the monitors, and no disk activity indicating a bootup. Left it powered off overnight, but it won't boot this morning either.

I'm assuming some kind of power issue. It's weird - it's an 850 watt power supply, and it's not driving anything close to 850 watts. Indeed, the new video card has a *lower* TDP than the old one. I'm hoping the MB isn't fried or something.

When I get home I will pull the video card and see if it'll boot with the onboard Intel graphics. I have two PCI Express 16 slots, so if that works I might move the video card to the other slot, see if that helps. Otherwise, I imagine I'll be replacing at least some hardware.

Specs of system:

ASUS P8Z68-V Gen3 motherboard
Intel Core I7-2600K CPU
16GB 1333 RAM
Nvidia GTX 970 (EVGA)
3 3.5 1TB drives
1 240GB SSD
1 BDROM/DVD +-RW drive
850 watt power supply

If anyone has any tips for isolating the problem, I'm all ears.