This exact thing happened to a buddy of mine after he downloaded and installed MS recommended (Windows Update) video drivers for his card. They fried the card. Completely. To the point the PC wouldn't boot at all. Not even a bios beep so he couldn't run his CD based recovery media. The only thing that worked was buying a brand new card and replacing the old card completely.
thanks for the comment steve I downloaded the drivers through the nvidia website - would this have the same affect?
Unsure since I've never seen this firsthand. But, if it won't boot AT ALL, I'd see about borrowing or buying some cheap cheap cheap card to see if the PC will boot at all. Then if so, thinking about buying a new card. Sucks I realize, but if it won't even boot............
i just bought a bunch of new video cards...worked great for about 3 weeks... one day the machine won't boot...one long beep followed by 2 short beeps... i check all the error guides and it is not listed...call ibm and try everything..no go...they will be out tomorrow to replace the mother board... just for snicks i pull out a video card and try to boot...machine boots fine... the video card went bad...hardware issue...not drivers i got lucky in the fact that i pulled the bad card first or it would have been a very long night... try stripping down your machine to the core and add devices till you find the bad one...no fun but it might just work...
baller1069, your MB have onboard video? Even if it sucks display wise, if you pull the video card, you *might* be OK, unless the onboard video in disabled in bios. Newer MBs will disable the onboard when it senses a video card, but will work fine when there's no card. An idea....
I haven't done anything yet because I dont want to further mess things up. could the problem be that i only have a 375 w power supply and because of that something fried? even though I think nvidia only reccomends a 350 w
Doubtful. It worked until you installed new drivers. Could it be underpowered? Sure, 375 running two cards? That's not enough. But did that cause the card to die at that exact moment you put in new drivers? Doubtful. And this isn't a Windows problem, since it doesn't even boot. XP/Vista/Whatever isn't the cause here. It's hardware.
I've run 3 cards and 5 monitors on a 350W PS. I had a problem like this in the past...the card wasn't pushed in all the way. Take it out and put it in another slot if it's a pci, or make sure it seats real good if it's an agp. Check your pins like they said. If all else fails, kick it harder.