tquattro
Well-Known Member
Yesterday I received the following parts:
I got together all the parts and all worked great until today afternoon, when after 10-15min of playing FarCry4 the screen went black, the message "no signal" appeared on screen, then 2-3seconds later I saw an orange flash behind the PSU along with a big bang. The PSU's dramatic death also took out the home fuse for the socket were the unit was connected. I had an old 450W PSU, and installed that and started the PC without the GTX970 and fortunately it started without issues, then I got the courage and plugged in the video card again and it appears to work fine. One small issue, the video card sounds somewhat like an old HDD when I start FarCry4 or Furmark(probably in all GPU intensive apps, but I haven't tried others), but no weird sounds when just browsing and stuff(I'm posting this from this desktop). After some googling, it appears that coil whine is quite common on gtx970 cards, some say is ok but it surely does not sound ok. At first I thought the sounds come from the underpowered PSU, and tried my brother's 700W unit... the whine was still there, but a bit less noticeable. Also, yesterday at one moment I thought I heard a weird noise coming out of the case but until I got near it, the sound disappeared.
Another thing, yesterday the screen would go dark for a second then came back on(like when you change the screen resolution) two-three times... had two instances of this: first time on dvi+vga cable and second time, about an hour later, when using an HDMI cable(during this time windows updates were installed in the background, so maybe they had something to do with the "blackouts"?).
I'm trying to understand what happened, before shipping back parts for replacement. A faulty video card or a faulty PSU? Could it be the motherboard? Anyone else had a "whining" video card? Could a video card whining coil make the PSU blow up in style?
-Intel Core i5 4690 3.5GHz box
-GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 970 OC Mini-ITX 4GB DDR5 256-bit(good discount because opened package)
-motherboard Gigabyte GA-B85M-DS3H
-RAM Crucial Ballistix Sport 8GB DDR3 1600MHz CL9 Dual Channel Kit
-power supply: Zalman ZM700-LX 700W
-case: Zalman ZM-T4
I got together all the parts and all worked great until today afternoon, when after 10-15min of playing FarCry4 the screen went black, the message "no signal" appeared on screen, then 2-3seconds later I saw an orange flash behind the PSU along with a big bang. The PSU's dramatic death also took out the home fuse for the socket were the unit was connected. I had an old 450W PSU, and installed that and started the PC without the GTX970 and fortunately it started without issues, then I got the courage and plugged in the video card again and it appears to work fine. One small issue, the video card sounds somewhat like an old HDD when I start FarCry4 or Furmark(probably in all GPU intensive apps, but I haven't tried others), but no weird sounds when just browsing and stuff(I'm posting this from this desktop). After some googling, it appears that coil whine is quite common on gtx970 cards, some say is ok but it surely does not sound ok. At first I thought the sounds come from the underpowered PSU, and tried my brother's 700W unit... the whine was still there, but a bit less noticeable. Also, yesterday at one moment I thought I heard a weird noise coming out of the case but until I got near it, the sound disappeared.
Another thing, yesterday the screen would go dark for a second then came back on(like when you change the screen resolution) two-three times... had two instances of this: first time on dvi+vga cable and second time, about an hour later, when using an HDMI cable(during this time windows updates were installed in the background, so maybe they had something to do with the "blackouts"?).
I'm trying to understand what happened, before shipping back parts for replacement. A faulty video card or a faulty PSU? Could it be the motherboard? Anyone else had a "whining" video card? Could a video card whining coil make the PSU blow up in style?
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