Resolved New Monitor Slowing Down Games?

I've recently had my 17inch AOpen LCD monitor die and had to replace it with a used Dell 1708FP (also 17inch LCD) which I got from a friend. The monitor looks great and seems to work fine but I have noticed that now whenever I play games (Battlefront II and V8 Supercars 3) they play like they're in slow motion. I've played these games for years without this issue and as soon as I replace the monitor they go all slow on me. I have tried turning down the graphics on each game to the bare minimum but it makes no difference whatsoever.

Could this have something to do with the graphics card not handling the new monitor or has something else happened here? I notice that this monitor has a refresh rate of either 60hz or 75hz (not sure what my original monitor had) - could this have something to do with it?

I have a P4 2.6Ghz machine with 512mb RAM running on XP. My graphics card is a Nvidia 128mb FX5200.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Look in Device Manager -> Monitor that it is not listed as "Default Monitor ". It should be listed as Plug and Play Monitor or the actual model number.

It may need drivers installed. Did it come with a drivers disk? Go to the Dell website and look up it's information (FAQs), downloads and look in the manual.

Do you have the nVidia graphics drivers and software installed? Where did you get them from? When you right-click on the Desktop and go to the nVidia graphics settings, it should tell you the make and model of the monitor, that means it has identified the monitor correctly.

Are you using the recommended resolution for the monitor? If it is a wide-screen and the old one was a square screen, it will use wide-screen resolutions. The refresh rate sounds OK, if it is too low you could notice the screen changing (refreshing) and it could give you headaches. The higher the refresh rate the more strain on the graphics adapter.

It sounds like something is using settings for the old monitor, either that or the problem is totally unrelated to the monitor. I haven't seen that changing a monitor would make games slow down before, settings somewhere I expect.

Can you try connecting another (different) monitor? That might reset whatever is not set correctly [just a note, don't disconnect/connect a monitor while the system is running].

Matt

 

Hi there Matt.

Many thanks for your reply. I have actually just found out what the problem was. Dust. When I swapped monitors over I opened the box and cleaned out the dust from around the CPU (it was running very hot). Evidently, I must of moved some of that dust to the graphics card because this is exactly when the problems started. I have just cleaned all the dust from around the graphics card and especially the fan and the game works perfectly.

Thanks again for your reply Matt.

Cheers.

 

OK, that's good. Thanks for letting us know.