Monitor went dark

[Noelectro]

Hi there, I'm having a rather interesting problem here, kind of hard to explain so I'll just give a run down of how it happened.

I uninstalled a game and when it finished the computer restarted itself, when it loaded back up the screen was a little darker, not too dark but it looks as though I've adjusted the brightness level.

I realized the cpu was running hot so I opened up the case and sure enough the cpu fan was very dusty. I cleaned it up which lowered the temp way down.

Everything seems to be working fine now, except the screen is still dark. Is it possible I have damaged something here? Perhaps there is a test I can run? Any help would be awesome.

Thanks.

 

[kagekitsune]

you can attempt to use the monitors menu and reset it to factory defaults if that doesn't work use your video cards advanced properties to adjust brightness/contrast.

 

[Noelectro]

Hi Kage, thanks for the reply. Unfortunately adjusting the brightness/contrast doesn't have much effect. I'm fairly certain this is related to an overheat problem.

I'm not sure of the exact temp when it first crashed, but from a cold boot up it would hit mid fifties in a couple minutes. Now that it's cleaned it idles at around 35. Is it possible that damaging the cpu could effect the display in any way?

I should've specified, the restart was most likely due to overheating.

Thanks again.

 

[KSoD]

Hello,

This could be due to your GPU (Video Card) overheating rather than your CPU. You CPU temps are not that bad. Get ATiTool and install that if you are running XP. It doesn't work on Vista. That will give you a idea of your video card temps. It could be that your video card overheated and that is what is causing this issue not your CPU at all.

Cheers,
Mak

 

[Noelectro]

Thanks for the speedy reply Mak, I'm terrible at forums, always takes me a few posts to get all the info out.. sorry! I'm running:

vista 32
intel core2 cpu 6600 @ 2.40 2.40
2g ram
nvidia 8800 gts 512mb

I have a temp read out on my case, so I usually have a good idea of the running temp.

The GPU never exceeds 60, usually runs around 55..

If the GPU was damaged would it affect my frame rate? I can still run anything without any problems. Aside from running it in the dark..

The reason I keep coming back to the CPU is the amount of dust that was built up under the fan, it was pretty caked. After cleaning the fan, I shaved 20 degrees off the idle temp. alone.. I almost don't want to know the temp at the time of the crash..

Anyway, thanks again for the reply.

 

[KSoD]

CPU's are tested at a very high temp before they are ever released to market. They are tested to run at up to 130 C in teh factory before they are every released. So unless you ran the CPU at a temp that high for a extended period of time no damage should be done to the CPU.

Most of the time things like this are more related to the GPU than the CPU. Sicne the GPU is the on that outputs the video signal. A damaged GPU would cause frame rates to drop among other things. What GPU do you have?

 

[Noelectro]

Hey Mak, you're probably right about the cpu then, there's no way it hit anywhere near 130.

I think GPU is my video card? I have an nvidia 8800gts 512, funny thing is everything runs fine, I don't know. At least I can still access everything here.

I'll see about the frame rate again, maybe I didn't run it long enough.

Thanks again for you input.

 

[Baez]

Grab a system diagnostic tool like PCWizard to see what your GPU temps are running at.

 

[KurrentEweser]

I uninstalled a game and when it finished the computer restarted itself, when it loaded back up the screen was a little darker, not too dark but it looks as though I've adjusted the brightness level.

Run dxdiag.exe to see if there any problems. Uninstalling the game could have change something with DirectX and/or the video driver

 

[kagekitsune]

Question how old is your monitor? lcd? crt? if changing your video card to the pci still doesn't solve the problem it may be that (in LCD monitors) your backlight has gone out causing the dark screen