8500LE fries monitor, or coincedence?

[Scitex]

A friend of mine called tonight and said his Dell 17" monitor was fried (picture started shaking, then black). He had just put a new Radeon 8500LE card in it last Sunday and asked me if the card could have caused the failure. I told him that I didn't think there was any way that a video card could cause a monitor failure. Was I right in telling him that? If his monitor reported the supported refresh rates or resolutions wrong and he tried to run it at an unsupported rate, could that fry it?

What do you guys think?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Trying to run it at an extreme refresh rate and resolution would likely have blown it out immediately, since it wouldn't be able to support that for any length of time. Other than the wrong settings, there's not enough power going from the video card to the monitor to cause it to die. The sudden shaking and then dying just sounds like normal failure to me.

 

[Scitex]

That's what I thought. He also told me he was going to buy a new Trinitron tonight, so if I had been wrong I wanted to let him know before he wasted another one :Q