Alex's Stuff

So there I am, doing my normal Desu Daily posting in the wee hours of the morning like I usually do, when suddenly my computer freezes. It had been doing it for a while until I realized my overclock was way too high and backed it down, but it was currently at a reasonable overclock, so I figured the voltage wasn’t high enough.

I restart it, up the voltage, then reboot it again, only to find it doesn’t load Windows. BIOS goes through fine, but after that, several blue dots appear at the top of one of my monitors, followed by a slowly expanding line of multicolored patches across a thin part of the upper part of the screen.

“Awww shit,” I think, remembering when I had googled this in the past (because I’ve had this problem before) it said it was a video card problem. Usually rebooting solved it, so I tried that. Nothing. A couple more reboots and still nothing. So I decide to fiddle with the BIOS a bit and see if I can change anything. I reboot again and suddenly… the computer can’t find any boot devices.

Figuring this must have something to do with the BIOS, I reset them, which did fix the problem, but the same video issue was happening. At this point I’m getting worried, because the issue has never persisted this long, and I do not have the money to replace a GTX 770 right now.

Then I remember I have a dinky mining computer in the garage that’s chugging away at magic internet money, so I go outside to grab it. Mining computer is off for some reason, even though it’s set to restart upon getting power, and the power is clearly working. So great, another potentially broken device.

I ignore it and open it up, then remove the 6950 in it after looking for a screwdriver that can access the screws. So I get the card, come back inside, and… my fucking computer is happily sitting at Windows, like nothing ever happened.

What the fuck, computer?

I feel like this indicates something in my computer is going bad, but I don’t know what. When it’s running, it works basically flawlessly. No crashes (unless the CPU overclock is too high), no artifacting in games, and all the diagnostic software says it’s fine.

In short I have no idea what the fuck this system’s problem is, and the sooner I can replace the core components, the better.