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Burning Smell, Black Screen & PC Freezing

4K views 6 replies 5 participants last post by  Taco John 
#1 ·
My PC: ASUS P4 2.67G with 1G RAM. nVidia FX5200 AGP graphics card. Compro TV Tuner Card. XP Pro SP2.

Background:

Last Wednesday i installed a new TV Tuner Card. System was fine til about 3 days ago.

The problem:

The other day i was working on my PC and started smelling a mild electrical burning smell. The smell faded before i could figure out what it is, but came back again about 10 minutes later, followed closely by my system freezing and my monitor going black. I had to pull the power cord out the back of the system to turn it off.

After a few minutes i turned it back on again, and it appeared to boot fine. About 5 minutes after using it, the same thing happened again and the screen went black.

At this point, i figured the problem was most probably my AGP Card, so i got the case apart and took it out. After changing my monitor back to the on-board graphics (SiS chipset) the system appeared to boot fine again.

I used it for probably 10hrs of use after this and was thinking the problem was solved until this morning when i smelt that burning smell again, followed by the entire system freezing up. This time though, the screen did NOT go black, so i assume the onboard graphics are ok still.

At this point today i removed the TV Tuner card, rebooted and it loaded fine. I've not used it much this this happened.

I'm not sure what actually caused these problems, or if they are more serious than they appear.

Notes:

I have looked at the AGP card & the TV Tuner card for marks or signs of burns, and neither have them.

The problems all started days after i installed the TV Tuner Card (in PCI Slot 3).

Is it possible that the TV Card was the catalyst of the problems, and has actually caused damage to the AGP Card? Does anybody have any insight into this type of problem?
 
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#4 ·
Well that idea went out the window about 4 seconds after booting up the system today. It froze and that smell came back. I'm struggling to see where the smell is coming from though. It doesn't appear to be coming from anywhere on the mainboard, and is a little stronger at the back of the PSU. I'm not hugely familiar with hardware, so not sure if a PSU problem could cause the issues i've had.
 
#7 ·
how many watts is your PSU? an underpowered PSU running more power-hungry components can fry stuff in a hurry. IF it's anything under 350w, you should buy a bigger PSU for that card...i had a 5200 for a few weeks and it messed up because i was running it on a 250w PSU that came with this Dell comp....you need to bump it up to about 400w and that will likely solve the problem, although i'm no computer whiz.
 
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