OK. So I came home tonight and it appears my computer is fried. I am greatly vexed. It’s a custom build that I put together at Christmas. From memory, here’s a rundown:

• EVGA 608i Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6550
• XFX GeForce 8800GT (Alpha Dog Edition - it came overclocked but due to instability i’ve been running it slightly below clock speeds)
• 2GB Corsair RAM
• 2 HDs - A 320GB Seagate Barracuda SATA drive (primary) and a 300GB Western Digital EIDE for storage.
• Linksys Wi-Fi PCI adapter

Here are the symptoms:

I boot it, everything spins up, lights come on, monitor even has signal. (No blinking light indicating nothing is coming in from the card.) The screen is black, however, and no sound comes out of the speakers indicating Windows has loaded. I get no BIOS screen, nothing.

I checked inside, and the fans are all spinning - MB, CPU, Video Card, etc. (BTW, I have an Antec Sonata II with the built-in Antec 500W PSU, so power draw should be fine here.) I plugged my iPod in when I got home, not realizing that the thing was dead, and it has gotten nearly a full charge, so there’s power making it from the PSU through the board to the connection on the front panel.

My guess is CPU or MB failure. I tried taking out RAM, unplugging the older HD, swapping the monitor to the other output port on the GPU. Nothing.

I suppose, with all the instabilities I’ve had with the GeForce card (lots of lockups and artifacts when running it at factory overclocked speeds) that maybe the GPU finally died. If it’s anything, I hope it’s that, but it’s a PCI-E card and I don’t have any spares to swap with it (all my old cards are AGP and the MB doesn’t have an AGP port.)

I’m kind of at a loss here. I don’t want to start buying stuff to try to fix it, especially because I don’t have the budget for it. But just about everything I do is on that PC, and I don’t want to be down for the count for the next however many months until I can scrape up the cash. I’m using my wife’s laptop for the moment, but that’s a short-term fix at best. All of MY stuff is on the PC, and this thing isn’t nearly as functional.

Any thoughts?

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