Did my graphics card bust?

[imapcguy]

Heres a quick rerun of what happened. I acquired a old mac pro and installed an old extra hard drive i had laying around for while, i started working just fine untill i downloaded vlc media player, thats when my screen would turn blank and blue for a few seconds and then return back to nomal, this would happen at random intervals every few minutes sometimes many times at once (would flicker from blank screen to normal). I tried making sure the graphics card and hard drives where in correctly so i took them out to clean but when i put them back it just made things worse, now my screen in completely black and every few minutes it will flicker on back to normal but then back off again. Ive tried starting in safe mode, resetting pram, im about to reset the smc but i dont think that wil work.

So if anyone has any idea of what might be going on please let me know what you think cause this is really frustrating and im about to punch a puppy
thx

 

[imapcguy]

also the mac itself did not have the latest update, it was protected by a password that i don't have so i wasn't able to update it in the few minutes it was working.

im also trying to get the graphics card model and mac model at the moment incase that would help

 

[oldscribe]

Hi and welcome,

I acquired a old mac pro

Would be good to know Mac specs, year, model, ram etc.
Also did you download the correct version of VLC have a look here for older versions.
http://www.oldapps.com/mac/vlc_player.php

 

[Kaveman]

Sounds like a hardware problem, probably the graphics card, can you plug it into a different monitor?

 

[imapcguy]

MacPro1.1 2006
DDR2 FB-DIMM
Aty Radeon X1900

I tried using another monitor and it only fixed the problem temporarily then the screen did the same thing, but after a while display began turning back to normal for longer intervals of time, now its fine most of the time but every now and then it will pulse back to a light blue screen and flicker sideways

 

[Kaveman]

installed an old extra hard drive

many of those old Pros get tired power supplies, maybe that extra HD is causing the power to drop.