VPU recover leads to dead bios

[Kodiak31415]

Hey there.

I have a very very weird problem with my comp. It ran fine yesterday (playing diablo 2) for about 6 hours. Today, within seconds of starting d2 I see a wealth of artifacts and VPU recover (I have a Radeon 9800 pro) kicks in, effectivly causing me to re-boot. However when I try to re-boot, nothing happens. I get a power light on the case, and my drives spin up, however nothing else happens. If I remove the ram from my computer, it beeps at me with I assume is the "no ram" message. Any Ideas what could be causing this?

ChinaTech VNF350 mb
AMD 64 3300+
2x 512mb ddr400 ram
Radeon 9800pro (128 meg)
IBM Deskstar 7200 rpm ata133 HD 200gb

 

[zephead]

your board (assuming it's a chaintech), coming from a maker known for thier low quality, would be a big suspect. and without ram the machine shouldn't work at all, taking it out is pointless.
attempt resetting the bios and/or taking the battery out for more than 10 minutes.

 

[Justin]

zephead: Please show me some evidence of chaintech being "low-quality". Rumors and speculation do not count. I admit they are not on part with ASUS and ABIT in terms of high-quality, but plainly saying they are "low-quality"is like saying if you buy chaintech, you're an ***** and your board will fail.



Kodiak: A BIOS reset may fix it as zephead suggested. Also, if you have a spare video card, replace the 9800 and see if another one boots. Re-seat the video card as well. If you still get no beeps and no POST, then it may be a bad motherboard (but try another video card first).

 

[Vigilante]

In extremely general terms, low quality motherboards are those that use lower quality parts. Low quality capacitors and components. Less resistant to power issues. Less resistant to surges, less resistant to malfunctioning plug-in boards. All this of course, to save on price and manufacturing costs.

A personal bias can also come from an isolated incident. We sold a handful of one particular motherboard from ECS, and had nothing but trouble from it for months and months after. And now I will not buy another ECS board. perhaps that is wrong.

I'd venture to say that any manufaturer has their "low-end" cheap boards, with low-quality components compared to their high end systems.
Perhaps a certain company specializes in making low-cost, thus low quality, motherboards. I don't know much about Chaintech, but off-hand I'd probably say the bulk of their stuff is not going to be the best. Though it's not written in stone.
I like MSI, but even they have to low-end boards I wouldn't buy.

So anyhoo, enough theory.

Just as a guess, if you see artifacts on screen and the ATI tool pops up. You might check into the cooling of your video card to make sure it didn't overheat and damage a chip or it's RAM after the previous, long, gaming session.

If you can, run a video RAM tester. Odd video RAM errors can cause screen bugs.

 

[zephead]

zephead: Please show me some evidence of chaintech being "low-quality". Rumors and speculation do not count. I admit they are not on part with ASUS and ABIT in terms of high-quality, but plainly saying they are "low-quality"is like saying if you buy chaintech, you're an ***** and your board will fail.

i don't mean to say that chaintech buyers are 'stupid' or any such thing. i mereley said that chaintech generally makes low(er) quality boards than other major manufacturers.