Resolved Monitor And Video Card Fail At Same Time

Hi, a friend of mine had both his Video card and Monitor bust at the same time, I have been trying to work out what the cause was.
I have not been able to find anything and I am wondering if the video card when it faulted has taken the Monitor with it, or is it more likely that the failing LCD Monitor 3 years old taken the video card with it.
It would be very unusual in my opinion for both items to break down at the same time, monitor 3 years old and video card 2.5 years old.
I would be keen to hear from others what their opinions or experiences suggest happened here.

 

No expert here Hawk and I do agree it's strange for both to fail simultaneously, is it possible your friend disconnected the data cable whilst the system was powered up?

 

A power surge perhaps ? Or Law of Average catching up ?

Just a thought.

 

Hi guys, and thanks for replying,
wildfire, no he never opened the case, probably wouldn't know how to
rsinfo, a power surge, could be possible I did ask him that, but he was not aware of any, nothing else in the house was affected around that time, but it is a possibility I guess. Law of Average ?? Murphys Law ??
hawk22

 

No need to open the case to disconnect the video data cable hawk

 

Not thinking to well am I but no, I believe he had no reason to disconnect at the time.
hawk22

 

Fair enough but other than pure coincidence the cable's where I'd look for a fault.

 

Cross-check? Has the monitor been checked by connecting it to another computer? The graphics adapter could be checked by putting it into another computer (see if the first few screens at startup work, then power-off with the power button...you don't want it to load into Windows and have it install another/extra set of graphics drivers).

Matt
A PS...If the resolution has been set out of range, it will just show a blank screen. Is it possible that nothing is wrong, just the resolution is out of range?

 

Hi Matt, thanks for the reply, yes one of the first things we did was test it on my spare machine, video worked on VGA for about 10 to 15 minutes at 75 - 79ºC before the screen would streak up (on my monitor) connecting my machine with my video card to his monitor in both VGA and DVI nothing.
hawk22

 

My graphics readouts are 42 - 44*C, just running the browser, if that tells you very much. I know drivers are quite important and fixed temperature problems that were causing weird graphics for me.

I haven't known the graphics adapter to "blow" a monitor, but there some very strange things that can happen with these machines . As I mentioned, if the monitor is being forced to run resolutions out of it's range, it will go blank. I have seen monitors handle it differently. Hmmm...have you checked whether the monitor's "on screen" settings come up? Can you set them to defaults?

 

Hi Matt, same here my video cards hang around the low 40 ºC .
We did test the card on a CRT Monitor with a Resolution of 1024x 768, that is on one of my old spare Monitors.
On his LCD Monitor we also tested with 1024x 768 and the Monitors native resolution, it would come on for a few minutes and then streak out.
The machine has now been running for about 2 weeks with my old 128 MB PCIe card connected to a old 21 "CRT without any faults.
We are now in the process of buying a replacement Monitor and a 1GIG Radeon PCIe Graphics Card, still a bit undecided on that one.
My choice would be the Radeon 5570 or the slightly more expensive 5750.
hawk22

 

Maybe a plan, but even if the graphics adapter seemed "broken ", I would still check any hows or whys. For example, why the high temperature? Any physical reason? Does the fan seem to spin freely? [Story...ZZZZZZ...sorry ...my friend asked me to look at a computer with a graphics problem, the fan on the adapter was failing. He said to get a new adapter and I asked if I could have the old one. I removed the fan, modified an older CPU fan to fit and it is still working well two or so years later.]

If a new graphics adapter is requested, try to match it to the system. The adapter might have good specs, but can the rest of the system run it well? It's no use putting a high-end adapter onto a motherboard that can only run a modest one.

Matt

 

Hi Matt, thank you for your dedicated support.

That was one of my first thoughts, as I know how flimsy some of them little Graphics fans are, but in his case it is a fan-less card, so that was not the problem and yes we did use the compressed air to blow out all the dust.

I use on one of my machines, a not really up to date Graphics card, its a Radeon 3800 but it has a 140mm Zalman Fan on it, it is a real bug bear to install, but works great.

Yes his system is well capable to support that card Win.7, Intel core two duo and 4 GIG of Ram

I think that probably some capacitors or something like that are faulty and caused the card to overheat to such an extend 79ºC idling not good.

I'll throw in a plug for Australian buyers, PC Case Gear have very competitive prizes. (I'm not getting pay'd for that)
hawk22

 

If that's your plan, let us know if you run across any problems, otherwise, I don't need to tell you, please just mark the thread resolved.

(Let us know if you can get the monitor working.)

Best luck with it.

Matt