monitor displaying lots of colors and being wierd

[xidis]

My hardware is as follows:
AMD 2500+ CPU
ASUS A7V600-x Motherboard
ATI RADEON 9600XT
19" Viewsonic E90 monitor
512mb PC3200 Kingston VALUERAM
ASUS 52x CD ROM
Western Digital 80gb HD
Windows 2000

This issue started last night when I was installing STEAM to play Counter Strike. I loaded the game up and as soon as I got into the server, the image on my screen froze and then my monitor shut down and went into stand by mode. I could not get it to turn back on. I rebooted and tried again. This time before shutting off, it displayed a whole bunch of colors in a random order, and then shut off. I rebooted once more. I then put in morrowind and loaded that. Again, the monitor froze showed a whole bunch of colors and went into standby mode, which i could not get it out of. The sound went off a minute later. This morning, it did the same thing with morrowind. I tried wolfenstein next, only to have it do the same thing again, buy i did get an error. The graphics card has an abilitiy to restart the VPU if something goes wrong. I got an error saying something like this: VPU isn't responding to video card driver commands.

I uninstalled the drivers and reinstalled them, the same thing happened accept it started to happen while i was on the desktop. The monitor would just go off. I tried a few other things and ended up reformatting and reinstalling windows.

That did nothing because as I was downloading SP4, the monitor shut off. Since i wasn't in the room when it did this, I installed wolfenstein to confirm my suspiscion and the monitor froze up, only this time i did not reboot, i was able to get back to the desktop because the VPU recover feature prevented me from rebooting.

I am completly out of ideas now. I have no idea why my computer is doing this. It is brand new, except for the graphics card which has been running perfectly up to this point in my old Dell computer. I don't know whats causing these display crashes or how to fix them. I have two suspicions, either my graphics card has gone bad (which i think is unlikely) or my hardware is having issues with windows 2000. The RADEON worked fine on Windows XP.

If you have any advice, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

Calvin

[Akira_210]

Re: monitor displaying lots of colors and being wierd

I had the same problem but i recently found out that my board was no grounded to the case so i was getting a few errors, make sure that there are no loose posts and make sure nothing is shorting out

[Orcspewer]

Re: monitor displaying lots of colors and being wierd

Your monitor might be broken, is your entire computer freezing up or just the monitor shuting off? I had a similar problem and it was my monitor, I had it for a while so I wasn't suprised.

[Raggy]

Re: monitor displaying lots of colors and being wierd

Your graphics card might be fried if it is having these errors when doing high graphic processing operations only.

Try several different drivers for your card to check that as it might be an issue with the latest drivers.

Check out your version of direct X as I hear the latest version can be buggy and that is updated with many games.. run a direct X diagnostic check and maybe try putting in a different version to see if it resolves some of the problems.

Try reseating you graphics card.

If you have the chance try the card out in another machine to see if it is functioning alright on that.

If none of the above works and the card is new then send it back. If out of warrantee throw out of window ;)