Please Help - Monitor shuts down randomly

My Monitor randomly shuts down and does not recover. It only happens when i play Guild Wars. I tried playing other games and it also shut down when i played Cross Fire and Combat Arms. But it doesn't shut down to other games such as Ragnarok.

The CPU/tower is still running and the monitor is still on. but it goes blank / black and it doesn't leave any prompted message besides "power save mode"

Can someone please help me? I really want to focus on GW.

Edit: It shuts down randomly within an hour, sometimes 30 mins sometimes longer than 2 hours.

I have Dell
Model: XPS 8100
Graphix card : Nvidia GeForce
Ram: 8 GB
64 Bit

It's probably not the monitor that's the problem, if it works otherwise, although there is a small chance that it could have a thermal fault. You'd have to try a different monitor.

More likely it's that your video card is overheating. In any case, the first thing to do is to open the computer up and make sure all fans are running and then shut it down and clean the dust out of the computer, particularly any heatsinks and/or fans.

If that doesn't help, it's most likely that your video card can't handle the graphics settings in the games. Make sure that your in-game rez matches your monitor/desktop rez and lower the settings level.

Propably (Edit: Most likely) this. I had same and with proper cooling it disappeared. Just blow dust out of da thing.

Yup. Just take out your graphics card and dust out the fan/heatsink. Probably will want to dust out the CPU fan/heatsink and the pc power-supply while it's all open.

Let us know if that solves the issue.

Flat mate has a desk fan pointing at his open case because of this.

If you watch his GPU fan (g card fan ) you can see it try to spin but fail to get going causing a shutdown so the card doesn't overheat.

Ways to test a graphical issue could be:
- try running guildwars in window mode
- try re-installing Direct x or installing an older version.

If its failing only certain games its most likely an over heating or driver issue.
Probably overheating cause its "randomly"

One last thing you could check the "event viewer" and see what kind of error
windows is giving you ( IF it is ).

Good luck either way

Sounds like the classic overheating GPU, where the drivers panic and the card totally crashes.

Thanks a lot for the advice guys. Im going to take the following steps.

1. Get Air Spray and open my Tower and clean the dust and fans.
2. Keep a log how long it'll run after cleaning and see if it fixes it.

If this doesn't work, what should i do next?

I really appreciate your guys help (:

If that doesn't work you could have fried the graphics card...assuming people are right in that it is the graphics card. Which I would agree with checking first.

You could check and see if your computer is detecting it or if it is running things off your on board graphics(assuming your mobo has onbo graphics).


If it was fried though and your mobo has onbo graphics then it shouldn't be messing up with guild wars because the game would be running off the onbo graphics and not the messed up graphics card...Which would support its simply overheating and not physically damaged yet. However, with enough time or enough heat it will reach the point of being damaged.

To check and see if the graphics card is messed up I would put it in another comp and run a game that you know messes up on your comp..gw, Cross Fire, Combat Arms and see if it messes up on the 2nd comp as well.

I cleaned the fan and opened it up. Got a dust cleaner and i think it fixed it.

thank you for everyone and for helping me out!

so far my computer isnt dying.. so far.. (: