PC Problem

[Starzy]

My Brother just emailed me to post this up for him. Can anyone help...

Hi folks,

Not sure if anyone has the same problem or can help me but after a few mins of playing a game (it’s happened with WOW and C&C the monitor turns itself off (black screen) and says "no signal" but the pc is still switched on and I have to switch the pc off to get things working again.

Wow isn't a strain on my graphics card surely? And i'm running it on low-ish settings! it's completely fine when i'm watching a movie or on the web but it's just for games - I installed the latest drivers again as well.

I’ve checked speed fan and the temperature is ok there as well.
any idea what to do? I have a Radeon 9800 pro 128mb.

I’ve just bought a new Dell 22” widescreen monitor which is connected via DVI could this be part of the problem?

 

[Dureth]

If the graphics card is damaged at all then this could cause the symptoms your seeing. Basically the machine is crashing in such a way that windows can't even display an error message, which points to me a graphics hardware problem. Trying a different graphics card wouldbe my first bet.

 

[Crowze]

Graphics card or power supply would be my bet, although bad memory could cause this as well.

 

[Dureth]

Bad memory would normally give you a memory dump or a BSOD. Heck most will just reboot the machine. It's still worth running a memtest though just to rule out that problem.