Hi guys,

Recently a PC in my house has been having problems where you turn it on, it sounds like it's doing something but it just stays on a black screen and there is no input to the monitor.

I thought this would be a RAM issue at first so I took the side off, reseated the RAM and tried again. It booted fine.

After I shut it down and tried to boot again it done the same thing and never booted so tried to take out a stick of RAM I put in recently completely, and again it booted fine.

Like the time before, i shut it down attempted to boot again and nothing!

So I'm guessing there's no RAM issue here. I've bought it into work (I'm a IT Support Techy), not changed anything to when it wouldn't boot last time and plugged it in and its turned on fine. Shut it down again, tried to boot and nothing.

Any ideas? My next step is to try replacing the power supply, do you agree?

Yeah I would agree with attempting to replace the PSU next. If that fails I can only think that the motherboard may be at fault =/

You think there's any chance it could actually be the graphics card? I don't have any onboard on my motherboard so can't test it atm but it does sound like it's booting up like it should do.

Would it even boot up without a graphics card at all?

Thanks..

Could be bad video card, bad RAM, bad motherboard, or bad PSU. Seen all those cause this problem.

Just start individually swapping your current parts out with other compatible parts that you know work.

If you can time the event with such regularity, like every second time, it may just be incompatible RAM timings.

Your MB may not be auto detecting the factory SPDs on the RAM causing the whole thing to go "kaputz". Try checking those and/or setting the timings to the slowest between all of your sticks of RAM and see what happens.

After taking the side off the PC again and trying to boot it up I realised the GPU had a huge lump of dust in it's own fan stopping the fan from spinning. I removed this, booted the PC up fine and managed to shut it down and restart a few times without getting the black screen problem.

However when I took it home it started again, is it likely to be a GPU problem?

Still haven't managed to fix this problem. Can anyone help??