VGA Ports, Can They Die on discreet GPUs

Darshan_The_Eagle · December 4, 2016

I run the tech booth most Sunday's at my church. We already assumed something was wrong with the system because we have only owned it for about a year, and we store little to no local data on it except for some worship software, so we don't think it should be taking more than 5 minutes to boot. It's a Dell Inspiron system with what I believe is a Haswell Refresh i3, with 4 or 8 gbs of ram, a HDD, and some type of Nvidia GPU( we know that much considering the thing came with Gforce experience already installed). The GPU has a VGA port, HDMI port, and a DVI-I port. we use the main VGA port to output to the monitor, and the DVI-I port with a DVI-I to VGA adapter to output to our projector. While I was getting the power point up during morning sound, everything was working fine, everything that was supposed to have an image did. Upon returning from class, the monitor was getting no image but the projector was, with very little time to decide we just ran everything through the projector. So my assumption was the entire port was fried and we'd just need to get another cheap GPU to run the video outputs through. Anyone with any better ideas? Could it be the cable is broken in one spot and no longer sending a signal or something beyond my technical knowledge? Thanks for reading and any help or advice is welcomed.

Himommies · December 4, 2016

You know before you jump to conclusions check the obvious first such as the cable or if the cable is plugged in.

Sauron · December 4, 2016

Did you do any further testing to check if the port was working or not? Try connecting the projector to the vga port and see if that makes any difference. It's possible that the port somehow broke, but it's very unlikely.

KenjiUmino · December 4, 2016

it is more likely to have a broken cable or broken monitor than a broken VGA port (wich does not mean that VGA ports never die at all but try to confirm that cables and monitor are ok before buying a new GPU)

if you have another cable that you know is working then try connecting the monitor with that one to find out if it is the cable.

if that does not help, try switching the ports ... connect the projector to the VGA and the monitor to the DVI-I and see if anything changes.

if the monitor gets a signal after switching ports and the projector does not then it really could be the VGA port ...