Ooooh crap. I was running around inside Doom III last night and my PC switched off on me. I left it a few seconds, and (probably unwisely) switched it back on again. Bang! Crackcrackclickbang! Off again. Uhoh.
Usually when something inside a PC goes bang it’s the power supply. With a bit of sniffing around – literally – I couldn’t work out whether the smell of burning silicon and rubber was coming from the power supply, the graphics card or both. I unplugged it and left it all to cool off. An hour or two later I tried powering up again, and it flickered on and powered off. So the power supply’s not dead then. Oh dear – that points towards the graphics card. a particularly expensive part of my system. Oh wait, it IS the most expensive part of my system. Shiiiit.
The ATI 9800 graphics card draws power directly from the power supply, so I unplugged it from the whole thing, and the computer started up fine. Of course it wouldn’t boot because there’s no graphics card, but the PSU seems OK. I plugged the graphics card back in, powered up and watched a little flaming molten droplet fall from the card and wink out on the base of the case. Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.
OK, so it was a teensy weensy bit overclocked, but there were no artefacts onscreen. Hey, even ATI supply overclocking tools in their drivers these days (I’ll find and post the link later).
Anyway. The card was over a year old, and I can’t even remember where I bought it from, so I’ll be buying a new one very soon. I need to decide, ATI or Nvidia?
