My computer has been playing up since I upgraded to a new Radeon 5870. My system would take an age to boot (which I've since found out Asus have fixed with a BIOS update) but would also display artefacts as it booted, but ONLY on the "Starting Windows 7" screen and they disappeared once the login screen started and never appeared during games, browsing, watching video's etc. I used to have to turn the PC on and leave it idling away (with a black screen, wouldn't even post) for about 5 minutes. A soft reset would then enable the PC to boot after a while. Aside from these two issues the system was rock solid up until a week ago when the artefacts suddenly appeared on my desktop whilst watching the latest Zero Punctuation. I restarted and the system as usual refused to POST. I went through my normal procedure but the system refused to POST at all. I then tried both my old 8800GTX's that the 5870 replaced but still no joy. Tried booting with 1 HDD connected and just the graphics card (all three) and one stick of RAM but still nothing. At this point I'm somewhat stuck.
I'm guessing that the motherboard has died, either caused by a fault 5870 or just of old age as it must be pushing three years now. I'm leaning towards the 5870 purely because the problems started when that was installed but then again the card ran fine for about a month in heavy'ish usage. It's annoying as the QX6700 is running great and I just upgraded to 4GB of RAM when I installed Windows 7. So anyway my options:
1) New motherboard, new CPU, new RAM. Probably Core i5 as it seems to be the best value. What do people recommend?
2) Replace the motherboard with another NF680i board and hope I don't have to re-install Windows. I know this used to be nigh on impossible but if I stick to the same chipset (or hell another Asus Striker Extreme) would it work?
Opinions?
I'm guessing that the motherboard has died, either caused by a fault 5870 or just of old age as it must be pushing three years now. I'm leaning towards the 5870 purely because the problems started when that was installed but then again the card ran fine for about a month in heavy'ish usage. It's annoying as the QX6700 is running great and I just upgraded to 4GB of RAM when I installed Windows 7. So anyway my options:
1) New motherboard, new CPU, new RAM. Probably Core i5 as it seems to be the best value. What do people recommend?
2) Replace the motherboard with another NF680i board and hope I don't have to re-install Windows. I know this used to be nigh on impossible but if I stick to the same chipset (or hell another Asus Striker Extreme) would it work?
Opinions?