video card or motherboard fried?

[PhilTheDrill]

I just built a new computer about a week and a half ago (specs below). I was in the middle of playing the Half Life 2 demo, which I ran before successfully, and the power in the room my computer in went out, the breaker was overloaded or something (its happened before, and I was plugged into a surge protector, although I'm not sure it worked so well).

Anyway, my video card hasn't been the same since. When I started it up, the checksum start up would be scrambled. There were basically a bunch of random dots where the numbers and letters should be. Windows ran fine, no errors. I downloaded the latest drivers from the manufacturer and restarted the computer, optimized the bios settings, and everything was working fine. However, every time I restarted or shut down the computer after that, the same problem would occur with the checksum. I did the same thing as before (drivers, bios) to fix it. After repeating this process a few times over a couple of days, the video card finally gave up. I can't get any signal from it at all except for a couple of flashes of random numbers or letters in different colors.

My real question is this: is the video card completley fried or is the problem with the PCIe slot on my motherboard?

I don't have another PCIe card I can try in that slot to determine the answer. I'm using an old PCI video card I have and it works. Can anybody out there help my figure out what the real problem is?

Pentium 4 540j 3.2 Ghz
1 GB dual channel DDR2 533
eVGA GeForce6600GT PCIe 128MB DDR3
Abit AA8XE motherboard
Seagate 200 GB SATA hard drive
Ultra X-Connect 500W PSU

[Ob1]

try putting your PCIe card into someone else's pc. if the card works on there machine then i would say it could be a problem with your mobo.

[ror_b211]

Video cards tend to be quite solid, so its more likely the mobo has gone if anything. Try ESDing it

[Cricket]

Try unplugging the computer from the wall outlet for about half an hour. Plug the power back in and power up again.

Ob1's method of trying your video card in another computer will really tell you if the video card is at fault or not.

Originally Posted by ror_b211 Try ESDing it

"ESDing"? What is that? And how would PhilTheDrill go about doing it?

Cricket

[ror_b211]

"ESDing"? What is that? And how would PhilTheDrill go about doing it?

Just an idea, Electrostatiticly Discharging (I know thats spelt wrong) if the PC was surged, theres a chance that theres loads of little free electrons (Static Electricity) left over that are messing up the normal flow of electricity through the mobo and/or the graphics card. If you try to discharge it somehow on an unpainted water pipe (or something similar) it could discharge it. On second thoughts I don't think this will work. Worth a try though.

[juppy]

As long as his house is properly grounded, the third prong on the plugin would take care of any static buildup.