Okay, it’s not technically broken, but it’s still a shitty situation.
If you’re interested in “the point”, skip to the bottom. I’ll set the stage a bit in the meantime…
So I was working on audio editing for my next video, and my computer just shuts down. Cut to black, no blue-screen-of-death or anything. Of course, my immediate course-of-action was to turn it back on. I press the power button and…
nothing
I’ve had my fair share of computer problems in the past few months, so I’m used to not seeing my computer turn on when I hit the power button. But in those cases, some stuff would happen. The Power LED on my case would light up and my motherboard lights would kick on, but that’s about it.
But now, there was literally nothing. No lights inside my computer were on, no fans running, hard drives silent, basically a nightmare.
The first thing I immediately thought was a power supply problem. Because if the problem was with my hard drive or ram (components I’ve had problems with in the past), then the lights would have come on.
After like a week and a lot of back pain, I discovered the problem was actually the graphics card. I don’t know why it took me so long to think to test it, but it seems like one of the first things I should have checked on.
It seems like if my graphics card is plugged in and powered, then my computer won’t start. This leads me to believe that maybe it’s pulling too much power all of a sudden? But that seems like a weird problem to just happen out of the blue while I’m editing some audio in Davinci Resolve.
Luckily, my motherboard has an HDMI port, so I can still use my computer for all my shit. I did have a laptop I was using while I thought it was completely dead, but it was not pleasant to work with. And I couldn’t edit on it at all. There’s no way Resolve could run on that thing.
So where am I now?
I’m unable to play games of any reasonably high fidelity on my computer. I can still record game footage from my consoles. I can still edit audio. I’m unsure about how well editing the visuals will go. Editing video was already a massive pain considering how under-powered my CPU and GPU are, now I’m putting all that on my CPU. I’m sure it’ll be even more excruciating to work on longer videos.
What’s the plan going forward?
I’d like to build a new computer. It’s kind of hard to justify building a new computer right now, especially with the availability of graphics cards at the moment and where I’m at financially, but I think it’s something I need to do. None of my videos in the pipeline right now require me to record footage from a PC game, at least that I can think of, but I can’t just go without a dedicated GPU for months. Especially if I’m trying to make grow a YouTube channel dedicated to talking about Games.
So I’m gonna do my best to work around not being able to play/record graphically intensive PC games until I can get a new computer all together.
It’s gonna be a rough couple of weeks going forward. I was already frustrated with how under-powered my machine was when editing videos, but now it’ll be even more stressed. I built this PC back in January of 2015. This computer has been serving me (moderately) well for all that time, and it’s really starting to show it’s age. Each little issue I fix just makes me feel like I’m on borrowed time more and more. If I’m able to get a new build together, I’ll feel fully revitalized and ready to kick video production into high gear, because I know I won’t have to deal with multiple-second-long freezes in Resolve when I accidentally move a clip somewhere I don’t want it.
Thanks for reading this, whoever you may be. And an even big thanks, for sticking with me while I stumble through this like a bumbling idiot.