I have an Asus P5Q Pro that I think may have had a bad surge go through it. Power blinked on and off a few times and now whenever I start the comp letters are missing from the power on bios screens, odd colors/patterns show up, random letters fill the screen, and it blue screens and memory dumps when trying to start windows normally. I reset the bios via jumpers and that did nothing.

I can get into safe mode however. System restore did nothing. I checked each memory stick and they seem fine. My first thought was the graphics card, but would it be causing such issues at bootup?

Trying to boot from the Vista CD yeilds more lockups. As a side note I have never had any blue screens and maybe a random freeze here and there in the 2 years since I built it.

Any help is appreciated.

4/25/2010 5:43:18 PM

problem with RAM maybe? likely not.

4/25/2010 5:56:10 PM

if you can boot ok to safemode then it's not the motherboard (unless you fried something involving the video card slot(s))

by 'checked the memory' did you run a diagnostic on them and they came back clean? (all the sticks are being recognized in bios?) or did you just eyeball them?

[Edited on April 25, 2010 at 8:32 PM. Reason : s]

4/25/2010 8:31:09 PM

So I moved my vid card to the 2nd slot, and it booted up into normal mode, however Im still getting the matrix style letters on the startup post screens, and missing letters/odd color patterns etc.

Its not recognizing the video card, I will try to reinstall the drivers and see what that does.

4/25/2010 9:43:53 PM

Bad vid card. popped a new one in and everything started right up.

4/26/2010 5:49:11 PM