A Graphical Tale of Woe
As keen gamers and computer engineers, we take a great deal
of interest in anything that is special, cool, different or unusual.
As I have said before, a large part of the skill of a
computer engineer is problem solving coupled with tenacity and determination to
solve a computer problem.
Big J, a particularly large gaming rig which I have feature
before in a blog post, was brought in as a non-boot. The owner of Big J told us that he kindly let his nephew
have a shot on it one Saturday afternoon as it was a miserable day and his
nephew had been nipping the owner’s head for a gaming session for a while.
So to set the scene, the gaming rig was functioning
perfectly and all the nephew had to do was install his favourite computer game.
The Uncle returned later in the afternoon to discover the
side panel off the gaming computer and the nephew reporting that it ‘just died’
while he was installing the computer game.
Nothing was spotted as being obviously wrong internally and
indeed the nephew was correct in reporting that the gaming PC had in fact died.
Big J was brought into our computer repair workshop for examination.
On test the computer was powering on, but refusing to display anything at all.
Memory tested and passed
The power supply was tested and passed
Processor was tested and fine
On a hunch, Donald our Chief Computer Engineer removed the
twin graphics cards and replaced them with a lesser graphics card just to test
the theory.
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| Damaged Twin SLI Grpahics Cards |
Voila, the system booted so the problem was with either of
the graphics cards. A close surface
inspection of the computer graphic cards
revealed nothing but then the eagle eyed Donald noted some damage to the DVI
port as can been seen below.
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| Look closely |
Note that these very high performance gaming graphics cards
have two DVI ports each so the Big J gaming computer has a total of four DVI ports.
Incredibly, four out of the four DVI ports were damaged
beyond usability!
The nephew had been less than careful when attempting to
connect Big J to the monitor and had mashed all of the ports!!
With a bit of clever
re-positioning, Donald managed to affect a cunning port repair which meant that
the twin SLI graphics cards were still able to work as you only need one DVI
out.
So the moral of this tale is never leave your pride & joy
gaming computer unsupervised and be very very careful when connecting your DVI output cables!
Not wishing to blow our own trumpet, but it is rare to find
a computer repairs workshop that has the skills to do such complicated work as
required to move DVI ports on a high-end computer graphics card and the honesty
not to just tell you that the cards are mashed beyond repair and that replacing
them is the only option.
Of course, our on-line store carries a very wide selection
of computer graphics cards from the very basic all the way to the very top end
quad core graphics cards
