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3850 Cold Boot Problem

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I have a (I believe) GeCube 3850 256MB reference board that only properly cold boots 5-10% of the time. Most of the time the card fanspeed stays at 100% and the screen never initializes although the PC continues to boot. I flashed it with an updated BIOS and it still does the same thing. Is the card just junk? Anybody heard of this before?

Thanks,
Dan
 

GLD

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My 3850 was doing the same thing. I don't think it was the cards fault though. My dvd burner wasn't reading every data disk I put in it, and 1 of my hdd's in raid was not detecting every boot. I eliminated the 1 hdd and put in a good combo drive I had laying around. It has only been a day since the part swap, but I have no boot problems now. You may have a optical or hdd that is causing the boot problem.
 
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My 3850 was doing the same thing. I don't think it was the cards fault though. My dvd burner wasn't reading every data disk I put in it, and 1 of my hdd's in raid was not detecting every boot. I eliminated the 1 hdd and put in a good combo drive I had laying around. It has only been a day since the part swap, but I have no boot problems now. You may have a optical or hdd that is causing the boot problem.

Thanks for the advice but unfortunately the same thing occurs in two completely different systems that both work OK with other cards so I'm pretty sure it is the card's fault.
 
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Try not cutting the power to your monitor between boot-ups and see if that changes anything.:)
 

Paintface

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Hello, long time reader i figured ill register to give you my input :)

I had the same problem for a long time.

My setup was a MSI K9A mobo, AMD 6000+ x2 , corsair 650w PSU and a Powercolor 3870

It took me a long time to figure it out even though im still not sure what the cause was...

From the very moment i assembled my new PC it wouldnt boot at all, no signal on my screen but all the fans were running, if you waited several minutes screen would suddenly pop up with the windows loading screen on it, so i figured something during the early boot stages went wrong, i pulled out for example my USB stick, disable USB stick booting or any other devices in the BIOS and it would work again.IT would go well for a long time, sometimes weeks and then it all came back with the same problems.

second problem i had was my PC crashing during gaming, especially when alt tabbing my screen would freeze, 5 seconds later it would artifact and go black on the screen...

both problems made me turn the PSU on and off alot, which eventually made it die completely, i dont know if it was already unstable and dying with me turning it on and off alot finishing it off completely. Being unable to wait on a replacement i bought a OCZ 700w PSU which seemed to fix the crash problems, at least it was alot less frequent.

Till one day my PC wouldnt boot anymore at all, i put my 3870 into my brothers computer who has the exact same mainboard, and it started up perfectly.
Got myself again a new MSI K9A and it started up right away, and never had that problem again.

was an expensive and frustrating adventure, i dont know if it was the new Mobo/PSU combo that fixed it, but thats the best info i can give you so i would suggest trying other(better) PSUs and mainboard if thats possible to rule out card problems.

Good luck!
 
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^^ good man, registering to help someone out. Stick around.

I had a similar problem with AGP 3850. My first guess was "the PSU isnt big enough". Bought a new one. No difference. In fact... worse.

It turned out it wasnt the GPU but the mainboard. The new PSU was 650W, the old one was 420W. The old one actually had a better 12v and 5v line than the 650W, so the mainboard was a little more stable.

Swapping to a new mainboard fixed the problem immediately.

Important question: Is it stable ONCE you get into Windows? ie ONLY a cold boot problem?
 
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^^ good man, registering to help someone out. Stick around.

I had a similar problem with AGP 3850. My first guess was "the PSU isnt big enough". Bought a new one. No difference. In fact... worse.

It turned out it wasnt the GPU but the mainboard. The new PSU was 650W, the old one was 420W. The old one actually had a better 12v and 5v line than the 650W, so the mainboard was a little more stable.

Swapping to a new mainboard fixed the problem immediately.

Important question: Is it stable ONCE you get into Windows? ie ONLY a cold boot problem?

Thanks for replying, guys. Yes, it is stable once in Windows. My friend used the card for months and it didn't bother him since he rarely powers his PC down, but I power mine down at least once a day. I am almost sure it is the card because it has the same problem in two different PCs (mine - nforce 430 chipset, antec 380w earthwatts - his amd 770, antec 450 trupower). I had a MSI 3850 a few months ago that worked fine in my system.
 
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