Radeon VE Killing Monitors?

[Bongolation]

My computer or Radeon VE AGP card seems to be killing monitors,
which is an expensive habit.

A brand new CRT monitor I had purchased for the system died
after perhaps twenty or thirty total hours of use. Naturally,
because of all the other delays in getting the studio up, the
monitor was out of warranty, so it was tossed.

When I asked on numerous fora for suggestions concerning the
possible cause of this early failure, I was assured that it was
just a bad monitor and early failures were not uncommon.

As the Radeon 7000 AGP card in the computer is dual-monitor
capable and this function is of great utility in coping with
the many screens encountered in recording software, I got
another CRT monitor and also added a monitor from my office
that was left over from an upgrade.

Aside from the apparently insurmountable problem of getting the
monitors to match visually, everything seemed to be reasonably
functional, at least at first.

After only a few hours of use, however, one of the monitors,
the one that I knew to be good and which had been working fine
in my office, began to show severe vertical wavering top to
bottom. It was my recollection that this symptom showed up some
minutes before the first monitor failure, so I immediately
powered down, and have not turned on the system since.

Someone suggested that there might be a problem with the refresh
rate, but settings are for "optimum" the default in Win98SE
(which this system must use because of legacy hardware).

I'm open to any suggestions here. Replacing monitors is getting
to be a nuisance.

Thanks for any constructive input.

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[First of One]

"Optimum" means the highest refresh rate the card *thinks* the monitor can
support according to the monitor's custom INF file. What refresh rate are
you really running? 60 Hz? 85 Hz? 120?

 

[Bob Doran]

The obvious question, what scan are you running the card at, and what scan
is the monitors that died spec'ed for?

 

[Bongolation]

"Optimum" means the highest refresh rate the card *thinks* the
monitor can support according to the monitor's custom INF file.
What refresh rate are you really running? 60 Hz? 85 Hz? 120?

It just has "Optimum" with no other information, but somewhere on
one of the screens it said 85Hz for both monitors,

It's the ATI display program, too, not the usual Win98SE "Display"
panel in the control panel, which the ATI software appears to hijack
upon installation of the AGP card drivers.

These monitors are not the same brand, but the original brand new
monitor that the system ate up in very short order was being used as
a single monitor...so "confusion" between the requirements for two
different monitors could not have been the problem there.

The correct refresh rate is not printed anywhere on this monitor
that I can see.

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[First of One]

It just has "Optimum" with no other information, but somewhere on
one of the screens it said 85Hz for both monitors,

Some monitors, particularly older ones, cannot handle 85 Hz at popular
resolutions such as 1024x768. I have seen even a few high-end Sun widescreen
monitors with this limitation.

Note, you don't have to let it stay at "optimum". You can always specify a
refresh rate yourself, like 85 Hz, or 75 Hz, through the drop-down menu.

It's the ATI display program, too, not the usual Win98SE "Display"
panel in the control panel, which the ATI software appears to hijack
upon installation of the AGP card drivers.

Not hijack, just added tabs for additional options, such as multi-monitor
configuration.

The correct refresh rate is not printed anywhere on this monitor
that I can see.

Is the manufacturer still in business? Look up the monitor INF files on its
web site.

 

[Bongolation]

Is the manufacturer still in business? Look up the monitor
INF files on its web site.

I went and rooted around and found the synch settings as:

Horizontal = 30Hz-70Hz
Vertical = 50Hz-160Hz

I'm not clear about how this relates to refresh rate. I remember
being quite confused about that a long time ago, but didn't have
any problem with the way the system configured the monitor, so I
left it alone for years with no problem. Now suddenly it has it
when I connect it to the other box that had the new monitor go out
with the same symptoms, even as a single monitor.

The primary monitor, a Compaq V70, which shows no problem (yet!) has
specs of:

Horizontal = 31.5-69Hz
Vertical = 50-100Hz

I went in a while ago and fired up the box and monitors. They
looked OK at 85Hz, but after switching the refresh rate down, there
was a flickering under 85Hz on that monitor when testing. Putting
to back to 85Hz restored the stability, but after aboutan hour, the
wavering started up again. I switched the refresh rate down lower
again and the wavering became much slower and less pronounced, but
there was the flickering again.

I just shut the system down until I can figure this out.

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