Hi folks,

I've been gaming with dual monitors for months without problems, but in the past two weeks or so both monitors have been randomly going blank at the same time, forcing me to reboot from the tower. This only happens when I'm gaming.

Whilst the screens are blank, everything else seems to be running ok (sounds come through speakers as normal) so it's probably something specific to the graphics card (single card running both monitors). Relevant build details:

ATI Radeon X1950 PRO
Windows 7 (32)
2 Gig RAM

My first thoughts were cooling related, or maybe just an old, shoddy graphics card that needs replacing.



Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks for the replies, guys.

Cleaned out the dust/dirt with an air canister as you suggested. But whilst doing so, I noticed a loose fan lying at the base of my tower. The ATI logo gave away where it came from, so I reattached it to my gfx card.

Seemed to have made a difference as I was able to run the game for over an 1 hour without problems. But just today I got the same blank screens again :BangHead:

Backlights remain on but both screens go blank. One of them even says 'entering sleep mode.' And I haven't made any hardware or software changes beyond the mandatory Windows updates.

Looks more and more like I need a new graphics card? I'd be happy to upgrade. Apparently NVIDIA cards work best with the game I play ... any specific recommendations?

CPU: Intel Core Duo 2.2GHz.
Motherboard can take PCI-express. Is this what you mean?
Budget: £100 - £150.

The game designers recommend this: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460. Cheapest I can find is £109. Would you say this is good value? Or should I pay a little more for something better?

Thanks again.

Thanks again, I'll look into that one.