Hello, I'm a very experienced user but this problem has me puzzles. I was cleaning my PC. Disassembling all the fans and cleaning the massive amounts of dust. I had to pull out the GFX card to clean the radiator. After assembling it all back and plugging back the power the system wouldn't get past POST, instead fans kept spinning at full speed (as it always does during POST). Both the graphics card (Palit 8800GT) and mobo (Foxconn P35-AS) have their own beepers and both were silent. As I always do in those cases I started unplugging everything that wasn't soldiered onto the MOBO until all that was left was a single RAM, CPU+fan and monitor cable. To verify which of the parts broke I replaced the card, a Palit 8800GT with a card with identical specs, 8800GT Galaxy. POST, boot, works fine. This indicated the Palit 8800GT GFX card somehow broke during cleaning. Just to make sure if the card was indeed broken I plugged the "broken" card into another PC - it works flawlessly. It booted 50 out of 50 times without any problems. Stress testing shows no artifacts, GPU temps are normal. Games run fine, no issues whatsoever. Not even a driver update was neccesary. So essentially: card works fine, is removed, cleaned, put back, the PC doesn't finish POST. Put in another computer the card runs perfectly fine. Essentially a compatibility issue out of freaking nowhere. What could be the cause of this? How can this be fixed other than swapping the cards? Note: The connector on the "selectively working" card show moderate wear. The card has not been swapped around or physically abused beyond normal maintenance. Please advise. regards
you can try blowing out the video port on the motherboard with compressed air. sometimes debris can get left in the port after a cleaning and cause problems. i would even go as far as getting a q-tip and cleaning it with alcohol. clean the gold pin contacts on the video card as well. are the power requirements lower on the galaxy vs the palit? did your power supply suddenly lose some voltage/amp's after the cleaning? test the leads that go into the video card for voltage. have you tried resetting the bios?
