Black Screen Crash
 

I'm having a weird problem right now where my video will essentially shut off - my monitor just loses the signal and there's no recovery, short of a reboot. I'm not sure what's causing it; my only guess is that it might be power-related? It seems to happen during CPU- and hard-drive-intensive tasks, like video encoding, but not during things like 3D games. It also only began happening a little while ago, so it's possible it's a software issue, but I'm not sure what software could do that.

Here are my specs:
300-watt power supply
Radeon 9800 Pro
Athlon XP 2600+ (1.9 GHz)
DVD burner
2 80-gig hard drives (7200rpm)

My system hardly ever gets above 40C, so I don't think it's heat-related... I've also tried the most recent Catalyst drivers and they didn't seem to help.

Any ideas would be appreciated, this is starting to get annoying :-(

Bingle

Well, it seems that the MINIMUM requirement for the 9800 PRO is a 300-WATT PSU. Or it could be because you might have Overclocked some of your hardware?

the power supply is not adaquate for that hardware I think. alot of that stuff is pretty power hungry. get a bigger (400w+) PSU...

Actually, it's a 350 watt, my mistake. Power does seem to be a possibility, then, but is there anything else anyone can think of? I'd rather exhaust all the possibilities before buying hardware :-)

Also, as far as power supplies go, anyone know how Thermaltake's PSUs are? I have a nice Antec one right now (the SmartBlue) and I like Antec stuff. I've not had any experience with Thermaltake.

Thanks for your help so far :-)

Bingle

I wouldn't recommend anything other than an Antec power supply...I've replaced far too many non-Antec PSUs to recommend anything other than ol' reliable Antec.

I'd get a new power supply, but short of that try unhooking one of the hard disks as well as the DVD burner. If that fixes it, you know you have a power issue, but even if not a new PSU would be good. :)

Not sure of the OS and you didn't say if it happens when you are working or if it happens after you take a few minutes away from your computer. Many of the MS operating systems have issues coming back from Stand By. I would check your settings and make sure it not set to power down the monitor and not to go into Stand By.

also another issue I've found if you have several power hungry devices on one circuit (in your house) you may get these crashes (happened to me)

It's XP. It doesn't go into standby - I originally had it set to power off the monitor after a few minutes, but I noticed that it wouldn't come back up, sometimes, so I switched that option off. Now it still does it, though ;-P

Anyway, I'll try unplugging some stuff from the PSU and see if it still happens.

Thanks all!

Bingle