shamrin
Active Member
- Reaction score
- 48
- Location
- Lexington, Ky
Oy. I have a machine here that had some booting problems because the Alienware BIOS apparently defaults to using RAID and forgets how to boot from a single hard drive. After sorting that out, I tested the machine "one last time" before giving it back to the customer and suddenly it had developed a massive video card failure. It was an unmistakeable GPU problem, artifacts on the POST screen, Windows boot screen and desktop, it all disintegrated into a lot of black and white lines and rhombuses and other nifty patterns before the BSODed (nothing in event log though). The strange thing is that it only happened on those 2 times that I turned on the computer. I had worked on it extensively the day before - no problem. It's running now with no problem, I even ran a 3D GPU stress test, no problem.
I can RMA the video card (it's only been 5-months and still under warranty) but I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether it could be something else causing the problem. If the GPU is shot, it should be shot, why would it work consistently and then fail utterly for just 2 boots (it was cold when it failed)?
I can RMA the video card (it's only been 5-months and still under warranty) but I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on whether it could be something else causing the problem. If the GPU is shot, it should be shot, why would it work consistently and then fail utterly for just 2 boots (it was cold when it failed)?
