Video died, but it's not a dead videocard, or monitor

[Larry Roberts]

Last night, my secondary system's (Athlon XP 3000+ with a
6600GT AGP) display just went black. I had the system up, & running my
personal Shoutcast stream server, and nothing else. I was listening to
one of the stream slots over my lan from my main system when I noticed
the display of the secondary system just slowly "disappear" into a
fine vertical line, and then blank. The system was fine as the stream
kept going, and doing "blind typing" commands let me close the stream,
and shut down the system.
I first just tried doing a power down reboot. No display. I
then figure the CRT must have died as it's an old 17". To make sure, I
plugged the CRT into my legacy Pentium 3 system with it's Voodoo 5
5500, but it works fine. I then think the 6600GT AGP card must have
kicked the bucket, but I installed a working GeForce 2 MX400 AGP, and
there still is no display. So both the monitor, and videocard are
good, then does this mean the mainboard's AGP slot is dead?

 

[Trimble Bracegirdle]

Have you now tried putting it back together again to see if the move-around
cleared
something ?
It can't be the monitor ...
Mother Board Power supply leads ???
Have you got an old standard PCI Video Card to try that way ???..
at least trying it would test & show you a bit more.
Mouse
@@@

 

[johns]

Sounds like a bad flyback in the crt. Those things
can be intermittant. Also, I've seen a bad vga cable
do strange things .. so it could be in the vga connector
either on the video card, or on the crt. One way to
test that is to turn the brightness control on the crt
up high to see if you have a raster. That has no logic,
and if you do, then it is at the connector .. cable or
video card.

johns

 

[DaveW]

That would be the apparent conclusion.

 

[Larry Roberts]

Have you now tried putting it back together again to see if the move-around
cleared
something ?
It can't be the monitor ...
Mother Board Power supply leads ???
Have you got an old standard PCI Video Card to try that way ???..
at least trying it would test & show you a bit more.
Mouse
@@@

Yes. I've tried reimnstalling the 6600GT back in, and
switching around power leads. Switched out PSU with my main systems
680W unit, but still no dislay. My old Matrox PCI videocard does
produce a display, but you can imagine what that's like on WinXP.

 

[JAD]

Last night, my secondary system's (Athlon XP 3000+ with a
6600GT AGP) display just went black. I had the system up, & running my
personal Shoutcast stream server, and nothing else. I was listening to
one of the stream slots over my lan from my main system when I noticed
the display of the secondary system just slowly "disappear" into a
fine vertical line, and then blank. The system was fine as the stream
kept going, and doing "blind typing" commands let me close the stream,
and shut down the system.
I first just tried doing a power down reboot. No display. I
then figure the CRT must have died as it's an old 17". To make sure, I
plugged the CRT into my legacy Pentium 3 system with it's Voodoo 5
5500, but it works fine. I then think the 6600GT AGP card must have
kicked the bucket, but I installed a working GeForce 2 MX400 AGP, and
there still is no display. So both the monitor, and videocard are
good, then does this mean the mainboard's AGP slot is dead?

Awhile back I had a machine that did this. It ended up a dead (almost) cmos battery, that
poisoned the BIOS and disabled the AGP. The only way that I can conclude that was it, is
after replacing that battery and flashing the bios, that fixed it.

 

[Larry Roberts]

Sounds like a bad flyback in the crt. Those things
can be intermittant. Also, I've seen a bad vga cable
do strange things .. so it could be in the vga connector
either on the video card, or on the crt. One way to
test that is to turn the brightness control on the crt
up high to see if you have a raster. That has no logic,
and if you do, then it is at the connector .. cable or
video card.

johns

The CRT functions fine when plugged into my Pentium 3 Voodoo 5
5500 system, and my Athlon64 7600GT system. Neither the 6600GT AGP,
nor a GF2 MX400 AGP works in the offending system. The GF2 is a
working card, so I assume the 6600GT is as well. I did get it to
display by installing an old Matrox MGA PCI videocard into the
offending system, so I can only assume now that the AGP slot on the
mainboard died. I have never heard of that happening, but you know
computers.