Hello, Hardware Forums. It is great to see such an active community working to solve the layman's computer problems! I will attempt to explain my issue in as clear-cut language as possible in hopes to draw the most unique responses. My rig was built in March 2009 and consists of the following hardware: ASRock K10N780SLIX3-WiFi MoBo AMD Phenom 9850 Black Quad Core 2.5 GHz with manufacturer heatsink and thermal OCZ Dual Channel PC 8500 RAM (2x2Gb) 5-5-5 @2.2v Kingwin ABT1000MA1S Modular Power Supply Seagate 600Gb 7200RPM 32Mb cache SATA HDD EVGA GEForce GTS250 GPU DVD Drive All of which is held together by a Thermal Take V9 Series Mid-tower ATX What I have been experiencing for the past, oh, 9 months has been a loss of signal to the monitor during anything involving full screen mode. Video games including Assassin's Creed 2, Mass Effect 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, etc. as well as programs such as Adobe Flash Player, Microsoft Silverlight and virtually all other video players will cause a loss of signal to my monitor at which point I am forced to hard power-off the machine. It does not happen every time I watch a full screen video or play a video game. However, it does happen at least once a day and often comes in streaks of 2 or 3 times within the hour. Furthermore, many times there is a "pre-crash" stage involved where I say "God damn it" over and over because I know it's going to happen. Say I'm watching a movie on Netflix and I'm halfway through it. If I were to simply "Exit Fullscreen" the mouse would have a sort of pixelation around it. It has a green red and blue dot surrounding it at some point and the position on the screen is shifted like 2 inches left or right. That is to say if I scroll over the minimize button and click, I'm likely to have actually clicked either 2 inches left or right. Not to get into too much detail about the symptoms, basically there is a pixelation around the mouse and very soon after that the screen will go black and say no signal. Keep in mind, everything is still running at this point. The processor is still processing, fans are still spinning (including the video card fan), lights are on, but if there is any sound playing it will skip like a severely scratched record and often just sounds as a loud BUZZZZZZZ. The mouse and keyboard still light up and react to pushing keys but no commands are received by the computer. Ctrl Alt Del does nothing. The only way to retrieve connection is to hard power off the machine and power it back up. Then just select start normally and nothing really seems to have been effected. Obviously if I hadn't saved my game I'll be back to square one but mozilla often recovers my websites and movies will often resume playing upon opening firefox. I've replaced the video card and power supply since I built the rig. (I started with 2x9800GT in SLI and my PSU crapped out on me a while back and had it replaced). My own personal feeling is that either my RAM is crapping out on me but somehow recovering right away so as to start right back up, or my MoBo video card slot is somehow shorting out. Temperatures are normal and airflow isn't a serious problem even though my heatsink gets covered in dust every 2 weeks. Thanks so much for reading all of this blabber and I really appreciate any guiding input that you may have.
Update: I've re-re-reinstalled Windows, changed the position of the RAM (they're same stick, 2x2gb but thought putting one in front of the other might change things), replaced power supply cables and alternated the modular pci slot from which it connects and nothing has seemed to correct the problem. Basically, I'm convinced it's not the video card, but it could be the PCI slot on my motherboard. Could it be my version of Windows?
