Black screen soon after Launch and "broken glass" effect

Hurrikane

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Logged on twice to try and use the repair terminal after a small deposit, screen went black (still showed cursor), sporadically showed the game again but like the screen was glass and had been shattered (lines converging on the centre) before freezing up completely to the blue screen of death. I have (for once) a good PC with 6gb RAM, 1 TB of HD,a Xeon processor and a XFX GTX graphics card... any ideas?


Hurrikane
 
Logged on twice to try and use the repair terminal after a small deposit, screen went black (still showed cursor), sporadically showed the game again but like the screen was glass and had been shattered (lines converging on the centre) before freezing up completely to the blue screen of death. I have (for once) a good PC with 6gb RAM, 1 TB of HD,a Xeon processor and a XFX GTX graphics card... any ideas?


Hurrikane

death grafic card ! or broken driver.
 
death grafic card ! or broken driver.

Those are two thoughts that came to my mind too. Have you checked fans on graphic card spinning - as well as the case fans? Check graphic card temperature too.

Could try an older driver possibly as well as graphic benchmark programs like 3dMark to see if that shows up any faults. 3DMark06 was the most recent one I used.

http://www.3dmark.com/
 
Ok, restarted and turned settings to high from v.high, no more crashing. Happened 3 times in quick succession before that. Computer had been on all day, maybe it got hot. Fans seem to work ok.

Thanks for all advice.

Hurrikane
 
I had the exact same problem from the start with nvidia gtx 550ti. What solved the issue was downloading a program called MSI afterburner and lower the GPU speed. It has to run whenever I use EU. Sometimes it would be fine and other times the video card driver crashes and restarts and then I get the messed up screen with lines all over. Setting the gfx in game to safe mode doesn't fix it either.
 
Check the power supply is adequate. Last time I upgraded my graphics card I was assured the PSU I had (around 500W iirc) would be fine.

It wasn't.

Everything but EU worked perfectly. But running EU required more power for the graphics card than was available, and the screen would would turn black. In extreme cases, the whole system crashed.

Upgrading the PSU to a 650W one solved it. There are other PSU calculator websites out there, but this was the one I used: http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp
 
Read that some video cards are tweaked some to be overclocked when you buy them. They run hot when being used with a graphic intense game like Entropia. Maybe try checking if it is overclocked by default and if there is a way to slow it down. Other then that maybe have the video card checked to see if the silver for the heat sink on the cards processor was put on properly. If it was not then it may have some spots on the processor that are not cooling properly and that causes parts of the chip to get extremely hot when loaded heavy regardless of how good the fan is working.
 
Yes most likely it's an issue with either the graphics card or power supply, i suggest trying a backup to see if that fixes the problem.

Ps. having the pc work fine on lower settings makes me think the videocard is fine just lack of power from power supply to run at the settings u want.
 
Check the power supply is adequate. Last time I upgraded my graphics card I was assured the PSU I had (around 500W iirc) would be fine.

It wasn't.

Everything but EU worked perfectly. But running EU required more power for the graphics card than was available, and the screen would would turn black. In extreme cases, the whole system crashed.

Upgrading the PSU to a 650W one solved it. There are other PSU calculator websites out there, but this was the one I used: http://www.extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

Yea, a good power save a lot of problems. 650W is more down border when you run a good GC. I recomment to use 850W.
 
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