[mdlug] Seeking advice or at least commiseration - possibly solved

[Ingles, Raymond]

> From: Kirk A Ellis, ThatCyberSecurityGuy
> Subject: Re: [mdlug] mdlug Digest, Vol 107, Issue 9

> Are there any beeps to indicate the problem?

No, there weren't. Just spinning fans and two lights lit up on the USB-based media reader in the case.

> Needless to say if you are getting nothing on the monitor or beeps it is either your power supply or motherboard.

It may actually have been something else. Last night, I opened the case, pulled the card, and tried to boot with just the onboard Intel graphics. It did slightly better, for a moment - a BIOS screen, with a corrupted line. Then it froze. After that, I couldn't get the thing to put out any video signal.

Naturally, I was depressed about this, but just on the off-chance, I pulled the CMOS battery and used the jumper to reset the BIOS. And whaddaya know, after that it booted! Even into Linux, no real issues. (Sad to only have one monitor, though.)

I reset the BIOS the way I wanted, and then powered down and put the new video card back in. It still booted. I installed an overclocking utility, and used it to *underclock* the card slightly, as well as setting the card fans to run more aggressively.

The computer passed several hours of graphical stress tests without crashing at that point, as well as some gaming (gotta do what you gotta do). That's not enough to conclusively state the problem is resolved, but it's a good sign. The CR2032 battery still had 3V open-circuit, but the real test is under load. I'll see if I can scare up a 100-Ohm resistor tonight.

So, in the end, it could have been:

1. Depleted battery corrupting BIOS settings.
2. Otherwise-corrupted BIOS settings.
3. Too-aggressive clock settings on the card.
4. Not-aggressive-enough fan settings on the card. (Without the fan adjustment, the card could hit 78 Celsius. With the new settings, I haven't seen above 61 Celsius.)
5. Some combination of the above.

So, I'll give it time to see if the problem re-occurs. If not, I might play with the settings a bit and see if I can allow a higher clock/less noisy fan settings.

Tonight, I'm going to play with the Linux Nvidia drivers and explore clocking and fan controls.