My home PC isn’t working. It’s not getting any picture. The last time this happened I switched my monitor’s connection from one graphics card to the other, and that solved it. This time none of the connections on either graphics card are working. Nvidia 8900 Ultras inj SLI (or was it 8800?) I don’t know what to do…
There is no nvidia 8900 so it has to be one of the 6 other nvidia 8800 cards. Did you try another monitor?
Do you have the latest driver? Did you try both cards in single mode?
Why do I always think they are 8900? I have to break that habit…
It’s not the monitor. I ruled that out last night.
I updated the drivers a month ago.
I had the one card turned off because it wasn’t working in similar fashion. It is still plugged into the socket though. That problem was fixed when I switched cards. No connections are working on either card now. I would have unplugged them and tried them one at a time in each slot last night but I couldn’t get my case open (the one screw holding the cover on is too tight to hand-loosen, I need pliers, I’ll look for those tomorrow).
remove the cards and plug the monitor into the mobo, see if it’s fault cards
How do you know he has onboard graphics?
I don’t thing I do. Here is a component list of what I do have (and what I paid for the heap of junk so many years ago).
I have to facepalm everytime I see configs like this and I see alot configs like that. The 8800 Ultra gets really hot and since you seem like a user that has not much interest in his computer hardware you don’t check you’re temperatures now and then. So my vaguely guess is that one or both cards are burnt to death.
yeah^
I’m not saying you aren’t right (in fact I wouldn’t be surprised at all if you were), but I had checked the temp of my cards and was told they were in normal operating temperatures for the (don’t remember the temps, this was a year ago).
And it’s not that I don’t have an interest, it is that I don’t know anything 
lots of dust can build up in 1 year…
…plus normal operating temps for the 8800 ultras is not “normal” for a high-performance graphics card in general. they do get hot.
One year without cleaning the heatsinks will most certainly block the airflow almost completely. 8800’s are known to be hotheads, though it’s usually not the GPUs that die from heat but rather the stuff that surrounds them (voltage regulators, capacitors and memory). It’s likely they are burnt due to exposure to high temperatures over a long period of time. This means your GPU isn’t supplied with enough power and therefor it won’t work.
Both cards dying at the same time seems unlikely though, shouldn’t jump to a conclusion just yet.
In the future, use compressed air in a can (NOT from a compressor) to get rid of the dust inside the card, once every 3 months or so should do the trick depending on how much you use the PC.
Overheating videocards is very bad for a computer, it can kill the cards themselves and overheat the surrounding components of the motherboard (southbridge). The overal increase in temperature in the case would also affect the harddrives (they really don’t like heat).
Oh, I think the other one burned out a few months ago. So it’s not the same time by a long shot.
I’ll consider buying a new card if I get paid in the next week or two like I am supposed to (one should do for now right? They come a lot better than three years ago I’d have to assume).
If I were you I would wait one ore two months until you buy a new gpu. Amd takes out the new 6000 series and puts Nvidia in a bad situation. The market situation will change. I guess the hd 6950 and hd 6970 that will be announced in a few weeks will be perfect for you. One card will at least have double the performance of your SLI setup.
Like King_Kaddo said, a single card should be able to outperform both 8800’s in SLI. A new card would generate a lot less heat than two 8800’s. Still, make sure you clean the card (and other PC heatsinks) from time to time. You can use software like Rivatuner to manually crank up the fanspeed of the videocard if you are unhappy with the temperature it is running at. Checking the temperatures once every few months while playing a game shouldn’t be too much trouble either (I recommend using GPU-z, a simple program that doesn’t require installation with a simple interface to check all sorts of temperatures on the card itself).
Have you tried starting in safe mode?
I can’t afford a new card. I will get last year’s model at newest (unless I find a really good deal).
And I have no backup. I have no other computer at home. Waiting a couple months is a ridiculously insane possibility to me. I need my PC back!!!
I don’t get any image from my PC to my monitor. None at all. No post screen, no bios, no startup selections of any kind. No visuals at all. There is no picture. I do not see anything but a black screen.
He said he doesn’t get any picture, that includes POST, so even if he could put it in safemode it wouldn’t do any good.
And the 6xxx series by ATi look REALLY good, hell, the 6870 by itself conquered Crysis at high resolution with 4x AA even considering that ATi never performed too well in Crysis. Wait for their release, even if you’re not planning to buy from the new series the 5xxx and 4xxx prices will definitely drop.
EDIT: if you have no backup card then scratch that
Any suggestions on model numbers? I was always a Nvidia fanboy in the past, and I haven’t kept up on hardware in… ever…
well… past ppl on here had similar problems but didnt mention that they could see post… just though id ask.