Nvidia GeForce 7900 Damaged?

[Eedarf]

If you look at the history of my posts, you'll see a long and arduous battle against unrelenting oddities. This here is my final trial, in the quest that is to build my first <gaming> rig. A few days ago, I was running Oblivion with the above mentioned video card and a 680w power supply and a beta driver ( Because of Windows XP 64-bit... ) when out of nowhere, the screen flipped and went blank. Two seconds after, the "No input" message appeared on the monitor. Everything else was fine, I had simply lost video. I had to go to work, so I unplugged the computer and left. 12 hours later... I returned, powered on and nothing seemed the matter. I shut down and decided not to run any more video games until I'd resolved all of my previous issues I'd believed to be, at the time, the root of the burn out. Earlier today, however, I was formatting a drive on my computer, now running standard up to date drivers on the 32bit Windows XP Pro, when I stepped away only to return to the "No input" screen again. The computer was still running, everything else seeme unaffected.

I've only owned this video card for 3 weeks. Should I have burned it out, what should I do? I purchased it, along with everything else from Newegg.com. Any suggestions on what it might be, or what I should do from here?

 

[kirock]

The card is obviously under warranty still so you should have problems getting an RMA (I've read here Newegg is pretty good for this anyway).

Just a few things to check: Make sure the 4pin power molex is plugged into the card from the PSU (I'm 90% certain the 7900GT and GTX have this).
Make sure the HSF on the card is working properly.(warranty issue anyway)
Remove and reseat the card to ensure it's seated correctly.

It sounds like the GPU or on board RAM is overheating and shutting down the card automatically. Just for trouble-shooting, take the side off the PC and put a table fan blowing on the card.

BTW, what manufacture is the card from?

 

[Eedarf]

I've removed and reseated a few times. The card itself, the first time it fizzled out, was hot enough around the heatsink, to blister.

And what is HSF, exactly?

The card is a 16x express and I have the 6pin express connector connected properly. The motherboard has it's 4pin ATX 12v too.

Why would the ram shut the video card down?

 

[Sharkfood]

HSF = Heatsink/Fan

It's going to be difficult trying to diagnose what the problem is, but as the videocard is going into "No Signal" mode and shutting down, it's most likely something hardware that is faulty, defective, flakey or otherwise unmmatched to the system (and thus failing).

If I had to GUESS, it sounds like an overloaded PSU- but this may or may not be your PSU at fault. I'd inspect your PSU and make sure you have like 18-20A on the 12v rail minimum, and multiple rail PSU. What brand is it?

It could also, very simply, be the videocard is disabled and therefore overloads/underloads and shuts down. I seriously doubt it's temperature though unless you are seeing some form of artifacting right before it shuts down. Most often when there is a videocard temp issue, you'll see either little white "sparklies" on-screen or larger artifacts being rendered. Do games start to do unusual things right before this happens?

Of course, all the usual things also apply... testing CPU/memory temps and solidity.. case ventilation.. PSU rails.. etc.etc.

If you know what mainboard you have, you might also want to see if they have hardware monitoring tools that log to a file.. this way you can run one of these while gaming and see if there is anything going into the 'red' prior to it shutting off in the log. (Abit and Asus both make hardware monitors that will monitor voltages, temps, fans, etc.etc.).

Oh, and NewEgg totally rocks with returns. It'll be pretty painless/hasslefree in 99.9% of the cases.

Good luck!

 

[kirock]

Shark answered a few of your questions, so I'll cover the RAM.
The mobo RAM or system RAM is what passes most video instructions to the gfx card. The on-brd gfx RAM in turn passes and recieves info from the GPU. GFX card is like a mini mobo designed to process just the video info.

A computer overall is only as strong as it's weakest link! Most ppl forget about the PSU as being part of the link in a chain. Anyway if the system or the video RAM overheats and crashes then the result would be no video out. In the case of system RAM you would experience freezes ups/BSODs etc first though. (An example is if you boot up without system RAM, the BIOS will just beep a lot, telling you it has no video signal and no system RAM, but can't print this message to the screen). So when I said on-brd RAM is was refering to the video RAM (sry for the confusion), I think the video RAM might also be overheating or just GPU.

Prob best thing to do is RMA the card to Newegg b4 it toasts your PSU or does other damage.

Cheers.