*fingers crossed*
For the past few months, my video card has been cranky, sometimes refusing to start up so that Windows boots but with no display I have to shut down again using keyboard keypresses. I think the problem goes back to when I got a new extension cord with a special surge protector. Each time I turned on the switch, I'd see a green spark at the switch itself. I finally resorted to turning off the computer PSU as well as the switch. Then two days back it crashed immediately after exiting Star Wars: Old Republic and the computer just kept restarting every few seconds. After a few rounds of this, I finally just cut the power. The next day, I headed to Sim Lim to get a new card. I'd been eyeing the AMD 290, but the price was an insane $600 odd or above. I finally settled for an overclocked 280, the Sapphire Vapor-X R9 280X with 3GB GDDR5 RAM.
Installed the card when I got back, but the restart problem was still there. After countless restarts, I was almost resigned to overhauling the system again (motherboard and chip at minimum), when we finally solved the problem by removing all non-essential hardware (extra drives, extra RAM, soundcard, USB devices) and putting them back one by one. Surprisingly, the computer started up with the old video card inserted, but did not when the sound card was put in. But then again, the Creative Audigy 2 is dated 2003 and the back plate is rusting pretty badly. So, long story short, I installed my new video card and got an old (but still more recent) sound card from my brother, a Xonar D2X.
Been playing Old Republic for most of today. Everything seems to be working, hopefully it'll stay that way.
Installed the card when I got back, but the restart problem was still there. After countless restarts, I was almost resigned to overhauling the system again (motherboard and chip at minimum), when we finally solved the problem by removing all non-essential hardware (extra drives, extra RAM, soundcard, USB devices) and putting them back one by one. Surprisingly, the computer started up with the old video card inserted, but did not when the sound card was put in. But then again, the Creative Audigy 2 is dated 2003 and the back plate is rusting pretty badly. So, long story short, I installed my new video card and got an old (but still more recent) sound card from my brother, a Xonar D2X.
Been playing Old Republic for most of today. Everything seems to be working, hopefully it'll stay that way.