First let me say that the computer works fine when not trying to play anything game-related. It can sit here at my desktop for weeks and be completely fine. The second I try to play any video game it leads to trouble. Also, Please read the whole post before answering just so you know what I’ve tried and the situation.
Thanks.
I bought this computer in October 2009 and it worked like a beauty. Then this issue started to occur around April 2010. I’ve tried a number of things now and I am completely at a loss as to what could be wrong. The issue that has been occurring is when I am in any game, no matter what game it is, after a completely random amount of time(could be 20 minutes – could be 5 hours) the monitor will display “DVI No Signal” and the amber light will appear on the monitor as if the computer has been shutdown OR the monitor will turn a solid color depending on what color was dominate during the time of the freeze. When this occurs I can sometimes still hear sound in the background from whatever was happening and I can still talk over the program Ventrilo to friends. Other times the sound will freeze completely and just loop and I cannot hear sound from the game or talk over the program Ventrilo. The only way to fix this issue and get the monitor to display anything again is to hold in the power button on the computer and shutdown the system and then restart it. After this is done the computer acts as if nothing is wrong. If the reset button is pressed then one beep and three short beeps comes from the motherboard. In the motherboard manual this claims that these beeps mean “No VGA detected”. This doesn’t make any sense because everything that has to do with the Video card has been replaced or swapped out.
So far I have tried:
* Replacing the Graphics Card
* Replacing the Motherboard
* Replacing the Power Supply
* Different Monitor
* Different DVI Cables from Card to Monitor
* Different Wall Outlets
* Different Power Cords for Tower and Monitor
* Updating drivers of the Graphics Card, updating the BIOS, updating Sound drivers
* I’ve probably tried other things but I can’t think of them right now
The only few things inside the computer that haven’t been replaced are the RAM(I’ve done multiple RAM tests with MemTest86 and nothing has been found), Hard Drive(Multiple CheckDisks have been run and it claims the Hard Drive is clean), Processor, and the CD Drive.
The EventViewer Application and System logs show nothing in them at the times of the crash, there’s not any Errors or Warnings. There was an error entry about something to do with WMI every time my computer was turned on that someone else was having an issue with but after fixing this I’m still have issues.
I’ve also been looking up this issue on Google and it seems to be an extremely common issue that many people are experiencing but I cannot find an actual solution to this problem. Multiple people have listed solutions that have fixed their problem but none of them have worked for me. So I turn to multiple internet forums and discussion boards in hopes that someone else has experienced this problems and knows of a fix for it.
Games that I’ve experienced this problem with:
Minecraft
World of Warcraft
Starcraft 2
Mafia 2
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Killing Floor
Left4Dead 1 & 2
Team Fortress 2
Many others
My System Specs:
Intel® Core™ i7 960 Processor (4x 3.20GHz/8MB L3 Cache
3 GB [1GB x3] DDR3-1866 – Kingston HyperX
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 – 2GB
ASUS P6T SE
Corsair CMPSU-1000HX (I played to go SLI with the 285s but changed my mind)
320 GB HARD DRIVE — 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s
250 GB External USB Hard Drive
Temperatures seem to be fine when running and are all recorded in Celsius.
Temps according to SpeedFan 4.41 while idle:
GPU: 48
System: 41
CPU: 37
AUX: 32
Core0: 43
Core1: 40
Core2: 41
Core3: 38
Core4: 43
Temps according to SpeedFan4.41 after 15min of World of Warcraft and 15min of CoD:MW2:
GPU: (65) (66)
System: (48) (49)
CPU: (49) (48)
AUX: (32) (31)
Core0: (53) (50)
Core1: (56) (54)
Core2: (52) (53)
Core3: (51) (49)
Core4: (52) (53)
I’m sick and tired of this issue and just want to get it resolved.
DxDiag can be uploaded upon request if needed.
Unfortunately my suggested fix of using a CRT VGA instead of an LCD DVI didn’t last too long. I still was able to play Mafia 2 for a longer period using the CRT VGA but I eventually got the black screen with ‘No Signal Detected’. This time I got an annoying recurring sound loop whereas the LCD DVI would just go black with no annoying sound. As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve got problems with playing Mafia 2, Metro 2033 and now with Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2. I’ve been playing around with the NVIDIA Control Panel and I’ve been changing settings and I’ve managed to finally figure out how to fix this black screen problem. Go into NVIDIA Control Panel/Manage 3D Settings/Program Settings and then select the game which you are having problems with then change the following settings to:
Antialiasing Mode: Application-controlled
SLI rendering mode: Single-GPU
Vertical sync: Force Off
By me changing these 3 settings, I’ve been able to play those 3 games mentioned back to back for 4 hours straight. I hope these changes works for you!!
I downloaded a tool EVGA has called Precision which allows you to control GPU and Clock speeds and it fixed it only for a short amount of time, eventually the problem came back. However, I think I’ve managed to solve my problems.
Here is the post below that I made on EVGA’s forums about it hopefully being fixed:
I completely forgot about this post, anyway here is my reply.
I’ve browsed these forums quite a bit and found multiple occasions where people are claiming the 285 itself to be a faulty card and they have tried replacing upwards of 3 to 4 times. This got me thinking that I wanted to try a different card but didn’t have any extra around. A friend let me burrow a spare GTX 465 that was at his house. (He builds computer for people and has a lot of extra parts around)
Ever since replacing the card with the 465 these crashes have disappeared. I’ve played Medal of Honor for around a total of 3-4 hours now since replacing it and it hasn’t crashed, before I wasn’t able to play for more than 5-10 minutes.
I also don’t know if it would have crashed while playing Black Ops but I’ve played around 12 hours of the Black Ops singleplayer along with 37 hours of the Multiplayer and have had 0 crashes.
As far as I’m concerned this problem is fixed and the issue was multiple GTX 285s that were poorly built.
Also, I replaced it on Tuesday Nov. 9th so it will be 2 weeks tomorrow with no crashes.
I had the same Problem with an ATI HD 4670 in Fallout 3 and Drakensang.
Try the Following, which worked fine for me, but do not ask why it works, because I do not know.
In Catalyst Control Center (there should be something similar for Nvidia Cards too) you can see and change the Clock Ratings of the Card.
My Bought-in-shop-Default Settings were:
GPU Clock: 750 Mhz
Memory Clock: 873 Mhz
Then I “downclocked” it to:
GPU Clock: 650 Mhz
Memory Clock: 800 Mhz
No “No Signal” Problems any more. And no curtailments in Graphics.
tough issue,
just because you ran lots of mem tests doesnt mean you do not have a bad stick. or an overheating stick….
try using just 2/1 sticks of memory, or if possible replace each stick with another.
run your games and verify that one particular stick or 1 particular slot is not causing the issue.
you seem to have covered every other possible cause. except your cpu been the culprit,