Diagnostic help

imightbewrong

Calling for help from my rig brothers and sisters.  So I have my 4 1/2 year old gaming rig - 2x MSI 970s in SLI, ASUS mobo, i7 CPU and so on. Win 10.

I was doing a spot of gaming the other day (Gears of War 4 if it's useful - £1.99 - bargain) and after maybe a couple of hours, the whole PC suddenly froze, and there was a constant tone (beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee) on the audio.  No amount of CTRL-ALT-DEL did anything.  After maybe 10 seconds of this I hit the hard reset button on the case.

Then it went into a reboot loop - power would come on for maybe 5 seconds, then it would all go off and come on again itself for 5 seconds.  After a few of these I hit the off switch.  Hoped it had overheated or something, so left it for a bit.

Then came back later and turned it on again.  No reboot loop this time, it seemed to boot up, except there was no image on either monitor.  If I pull out the video cable and plug it into the mobo graphics port I get picture fine.

This afternoon I've opened the case, taken out the cards, switched them around, tried one at a time etc, but to no avail - there is just no picture when the cable is plugged into the cards.  The graphics cards seem to start ok - they have lights, fans come on etc.

There are no beeps when the PC starts.

TL/DR - machine froze during a game, now neither of two graphics card give a picture.

So what is likely to be going on?  I'm thinking:

- Two graphics cards are fried - most likely?  But why?
- PCI slots on mobo fried?
- Some setting has disabled the cards?  Not sure where that would be.

Suggestions very welcome!

Delvey

Sounds like the PSU

imightbewrong

Any good way to test this before replacing?

It's an EVGA  850W SuperNOVA Gold

Delvey

You can buy PSU testers from Amazon. Can you try the GPU in another PC?

The problem with a PSU breaking, is that sometimes it can fry other things when it fails. A small chance, but still a possibility

jassco

Ye I agree, likely the PSU and hopefully it hasn't taken the motherboard and/or cards with it as it's a good quality one

imightbewrong

Thanks ok I'll look into this.  The PC seems to be working fine apart from the graphics cards.  Will see if I can dig out a prior rig to test.

MIghtyG

Could be the PSU or the GPU, as both have went at the same time you would assume its the PSU rather than the GPUs though.

I had a similar problem with two 1070s in SLI, only I heard a pop and a nice whiff of burnt electrical items when it died. Tried to re-boot and would get fans whirring on everything then die, repeat until I turned off the power.

Tested my PSU assuming it was that, but it all looked fine. Then Tried the GPUs one at a time to see if one of them had died and sure enough it had, removed the bad GPU and the system was stable again. Fans and lights all worked on the bad GPU so thats not a good indicator of failed GPUs sadly.

Only way to check I can see would be a PSU tester and a known working GPU to test the PCI slot on the motherboard.

If your cards have a back plate on them it might be worth popping that off to have a look and see if you can see anything failed on the back of the card - there was a pretty obvious scorch mark on mine when it happened! (not my photos but I had the exact same card & issues: Another EVGA GTX  1070 FTW OVERHEATED)

imightbewrong

Ok well I found my old 470 Palit graphics card and plugged that in.  It seemed to take a long time but eventually got a picture.  Then I swapped it for one of the 970s and miraculously that booted too.  Then I swapped it for the other 970 - still worked, and made my way back to both being plugged in in SLI and it all worked - tried it out by finishing GoW 4.  So not sure what that was all about - why it failed, why nothing worked initially, and why it is all back now.  Maybe some kind of surge that didn't do any actual damage.

Don't know but fingers crossed it all seems back.

Thanks all for your suggestions.