Failed post - screen flashes w/ grey lines/bars/characters

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Hello everyone!

I have come to this site as a guest many times in the past, and usually I find the solution to my problems by searching. However, this time I cannot find anything on my issue.

I just built a new pc a couple of weeks ago. It runs stable, I had no lockups, the hardware monitor always reports a good status, the temperature is cool.

I turn it off at night, and when I turned it on again in the morning three days ago, it wouldn't post, basically locked up with a flashing screen that showed grey lines, bars, boxes, some letters and characters. I turned it off, turned it back on, it booted fine. Yesterday morning I had no problems at all. This morning it did the same thing. Again, I turned it off, turned it back on, same flashing screen. The 3rd time the screen did the same thing but it actually started going to Windows. Upon turning it back on for the 4th time, it came up fine. I was wanting to take a picture of the screen, but now it won't do it anymore.

My question, is it more likely to be a bad video card or a bad cpu? All parts are new, and I have 3 more days of exchange period on the video card. Unfortunately I don't have any replacement parts to test it with. I ran PCDR and PC Certify, both didn't come up with any errors. I have already reseated video card and ram.

I would greatly appreciate any suggestions!
Thank you in advance.
Jael
 
mmm... it sounds that it might be bad memory...
try memtest out to check your memory...
 
Do the symptoms really seem like it could be the ram? I've never seen this before. Ram is new, too (Geil PC5300). Memtest didn't show any errors, it's been running for an hour now.

Any other thoughts?
Jael
 
Hello and welcome to Techspot.

It could very well be a faulty video card.

Can you try either your video card in another system, or a different video card in your system?

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:
 
Thanks for your input, you two. When/if it happens again I will take one of the ram sticks out (I already swapped their slot positions) at a time. I don't have another PCI-E card to test it with, but I guess I could put an old PCI card in it. Will do that, too. I'll report back when I find something out (for reference).

Thank you!
Jael
 
I think what is happening is your video card is keeping something from when yo uturn off the computer. So when you turn it back on it clears it.

Im sure its not hte ram or anything else. That would not do that.
 
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