X1900XT on the blink?

[si_edgey]

Hi guys and gals,

For the last couple of months when I turn on my computer the fan of my ATI X1900xt has been spinning up to max as per usual, but taking a long time to spin down again. Naturally, I ignored it (!) until Friday when I turned on my computer and alas, nothing is sent to my monitor and the fan on the GFX card stays spun up to maximum for eternity.

I have dismantled the computer and reassembled and removed the mobo battery for a good while and reseated it, but still the same result. Does that sound like a broken GFX card to you or perhaps something else on the mobo? :)

** UPDATE: I have tested the card in another machine and it is working fine. So...if the computer will not POST and the graphics fan will not spin down, is it more likely that the processor or motherboard has packed it in? Any way to further diagnose this would be great...sorry if this is in the wrong forum now.

[Buddy J]

Sounds like you're right. Best thing to do is to strip the motherboard down to the bare minumums: CPU and heatsink, video card, and 1 stick of RAM in the first ram slot, and see if you can get it to boot.

Try clearing the CMOS again, and also, replace the battery. A buggered battery can sometimes be the culprit.

[Komete]

Sounds like you're right. Best thing to do is to strip the motherboard down to the bare minumums: CPU and heatsink, video card, and 1 stick of RAM in the first ram slot, and see if you can get it to boot.

Try clearing the CMOS again, and also, replace the battery. A buggered battery can sometimes be the culprit.

Like Buddy is pointing out, could be one of multiple things. My bet is a bad memory module.

Same thing happened to me a while ago. I isolated it to a stick of ram by a process of elimination. I pulled it out, took off the heat spreader(voiding the warranty), more like pried it off, and there was a big dust bunny stuck in their. I cleaned it up and put it back together and walla the system booted up fine. I've been using that fixed stick of ram for about a year now.

That worked for me but your problem could be different. Power supply connections is something to look into too.

[stoopid]

** UPDATE: I have tested the card in another machine and it is working fine. So...if the computer will not POST and the graphics fan will not spin down, is it more likely that the processor or motherboard has packed it in? Any way to further diagnose this would be great...sorry if this is in the wrong forum now.

If it's not the graphics card and it's causing the fan to spinup hard and stay on, then I suspect the motherboard isn't even POSTing. if you don't visibly see any leakage from the capacitors on the board it's possible the cpu or memory died. Most of the time the motherboard died in these cases, sometimes a power supply losing a rail has the same effect. Frankly, without a bunch of spare parts to swap in/out for testing, this becomes a bit of a nightmare to diagnose.