… as I woke up this morning, to see dim and distorted display on my monitor. Horrifying! First thought that my Samsung SyncMaster 173V LCD monitor gone bonkers…!

Tried plugging the monitor to my laptop, realised it was working fine… phew!
Took out the desktop’s el cheapo Milkystar NVIDIA GeForce2MX-400 card to realise that the active cooling fan on the heatsink spoilt. Darn!

First instinct, was to go out to the living room, unplugged the living room HTPC (home theatre PC) that is pretty much dormant now, and plug out its ATI Radeon 7000 series card (that has CRT, DVI, and RCA video output) and yanked it into my desktop. Removed the NVIDIA Detonator drivers, installed the ATI Catalyst drivers, and voila, colours become more vibrant than before! Yay!

Everything was working fine for 5 minutes, then the screen become tinted yellow. Uh-oh! Thought it was the connector on the CRT not plugged tight enough, wiggled it, worked fine and then gone! Darkness!

Apparently due to the ATI card not having an active cooling fan, it overheated and died-ed. Fuck! I’ve now 2 useless AGP 3D cards lying around. Resorted to the desktop’s on-board video adapter for display now. No more vibrant colours, as the adapter can’t do more than 24-bit on 1280×1024 resolution! smiley

It’s a bad day, fried 2 graphic cards… sigh… now no more to do my project documentation…. fucked up! smiley