I have an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (AGP, 256MB) that I've used for a couple of years with a Mitsubishi Diamondtron CRT monitor. In January I added a Samsung LCD flat panel monitor as a 2nd monitor, attaching it via the 9800 Pro's DVI output (obviously the CRT had always been on the analog output). The CRT is now apparently failing, but I'm concerned that the video card might have been responsible. Details follow.
In the weeks after adding the 2nd monitor I had a few separate episodes during computer startup, where the CRT's screen would be noticeably pinched in at one side and had dramatically wrong colors (i.e., the Windows XP login screen was a bright neon green and red rather than a pastel blue ... even the startup "MSI Platinum" POST screen had wrong colors). Even after shutting down the computer, as the CRT went into standby mode, the colors it showed on its little test screen would be wrong. I'm still not sure, but it seemed like it happened if I had both monitors running before powering up the computer. Each time it started happening, it would continue on subsequent reboot attempts until I'd leave everything off for several minutes and then start the computer with only the CRT running (I'd then power up the flat panel once Windows was booting). I eventually took to always powering up in this order in the hopes of preventing a recurrence of the problem.
Now, over the last couple of weeks, the CRT has started acting up more generally, with a vertically twitching screen and horizontal interference lines dancing around in the bottom part of the screen. At first this was only happening after several hours of use, but now it's happening all of the time. So yesterday I detached it and just ran with the flat panel monitor on the analog output, to see if it was the video card that was causing these new problems. I let it run all day and had no problem at all, so it appears to me that the CRT is damaged in some way.
So here's my question: were those earlier weird colors at startup merely the first indication that the CRT was dying a natural death (albeit an early one, at only about 2.5 years old)? Or does the fact that this started happening shortly after I started also using the DVI output of the 9800 Pro suggest that the video card was confused by the presence of both monitors on startup and somehow damaged the CRT on its analog output? I'd like to know before I hook up a new flat screen monitor to the analog output and resume using the computer with dual monitors ... if the video card could be at fault, I really wouldn't want to give it a chance to destroy a 2nd monitor.
Thanks much for any opinions, experiences or advice you can offer.
In the weeks after adding the 2nd monitor I had a few separate episodes during computer startup, where the CRT's screen would be noticeably pinched in at one side and had dramatically wrong colors (i.e., the Windows XP login screen was a bright neon green and red rather than a pastel blue ... even the startup "MSI Platinum" POST screen had wrong colors). Even after shutting down the computer, as the CRT went into standby mode, the colors it showed on its little test screen would be wrong. I'm still not sure, but it seemed like it happened if I had both monitors running before powering up the computer. Each time it started happening, it would continue on subsequent reboot attempts until I'd leave everything off for several minutes and then start the computer with only the CRT running (I'd then power up the flat panel once Windows was booting). I eventually took to always powering up in this order in the hopes of preventing a recurrence of the problem.
Now, over the last couple of weeks, the CRT has started acting up more generally, with a vertically twitching screen and horizontal interference lines dancing around in the bottom part of the screen. At first this was only happening after several hours of use, but now it's happening all of the time. So yesterday I detached it and just ran with the flat panel monitor on the analog output, to see if it was the video card that was causing these new problems. I let it run all day and had no problem at all, so it appears to me that the CRT is damaged in some way.
So here's my question: were those earlier weird colors at startup merely the first indication that the CRT was dying a natural death (albeit an early one, at only about 2.5 years old)? Or does the fact that this started happening shortly after I started also using the DVI output of the 9800 Pro suggest that the video card was confused by the presence of both monitors on startup and somehow damaged the CRT on its analog output? I'd like to know before I hook up a new flat screen monitor to the analog output and resume using the computer with dual monitors ... if the video card could be at fault, I really wouldn't want to give it a chance to destroy a 2nd monitor.
Thanks much for any opinions, experiences or advice you can offer.
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