dvi output from Ti4200 stopped working

[Quickening]

Last night it was running a screensaver when the screen "pixellated". This has happened before and I blame Nvidia's drivers for it - the video card becomes confused; it is still updating the video output, but all that displays on the monitor are large rectangular blocks of roughly the same color filled with smaller rectangular pixels, all flashing and changing. I have to login remotely and do a _cold_ reboot to reset the video card (a warm reboot will not fix it).

Unfortunately last night, when the computer rebooted there was no signal from the main, dvi, output. I have a Dell 2000fp UltraSharp LCD display connected on the dvi output (using dvi-d connector), and an old crt monitor on the vga output. I am still seeing output to the crt monitor.

I have tried an extended power off (and pulling the power cord), and also disconnecting vga output, but no glo. Before you ask, no, there is no output even at boot (before an OS has even been addressed). The output is simply gone. I wish there were some way I could "force a reset" on this card, as it seems to me it must still be working - I had output (even if pixellated) until I rebooted.

Anything I can do?

[ricercar]

That reads like you have a hardware problem, not a problem with drivers.

The LVDS/TMDS transmitter for DVI can blow without affecting the VGA output. Have you tried to connect a VGA display to the DVI port using an DVI-to-VGA adapter? If VGA works from the DVI port, the card has a bad transmitter (and the GPU/drivers are working).

EDIT: Spelling. D'oh!

[Quickening]

I did attach the crt to dvi output with the vga adapter, and it worked. Suspecting now that the dvi input on my LCD panel was the problem, I tried connecting it to another computer's dvi output. Same "no signal" problem, but not 100% sure because that was win98 claiming no monitor was connected on the dvi. Also tried another dvi cable. Then I tried a vga cable to d-sub on the LCD panel and that still works. I don't have another dvi display to test further, but it looks like nvidia drivers may have fried the dvi input on my wonderful 20" LCD display. Would that be an "LVDS/TMDS" receiver? What a pain!

[pe1chl]

[i]it looks like nvidia drivers may have fried the dvi input on my wonderful 20" LCD display.[/b]

Why do you think the nvidia drivers are the cause of this?

[Quickening]

I ran my computer for a while with nv drivers - no hang.
I ran it a while longer on nvidia drivers only displaying to crt - no hang
I then ran it a (short) while with only dvi lcd connected - no hang.
Since then I've only run on nvidia drivers with both dvi and vga connected (dual screen - NOT twinview). It has hung about 8 times all in exactly the same way (as described in 1st post) and more than normal graphics activity ( once an "ls -alR /" was enough to trigger it!) gives me a pixellated/blocky screen with no way to recover from the keyboard. I have to log in remotely and halt the box to recover (the Gainward Ti4200 must be hard reset). This last time, after reboot, the lcd panel was gone.
It doesn't take much imagination to see that that wild pixellation on the screen could be overdriving the lcd panel.
Unless I hear from other Dell UltraSharp 2000fp owners that this beautiful display is defective...

[sajko7]

Same thing happened to me - although it was under WinXP, not Linux, but the symptoms seem to be the same.

I have been using my Hanns-G LCD panel for about a year and a half. It's 19" HX191D model. I've been using DVI input most of the times, and occassionaly VGA input. The cards used so far were: Sapphire Radeon 9800Pro, Asus Radeon X800 XT Extreme, and now - Club3D GeForce 7900 GTX. I use this computer mostly for gaming, Battlefield2 to be precise. I've played this game on all three graphics cards and couple of days ago I was playing as usual when something weird happened - the screen went blank, then the message "no signal input, check video cable" went on, as if the cable wasn't connected. And that simply wasn't true, because I didn't fiddle with the cables at all.

I'm afraid the DVI input in the LCD panel got fried somehow, I don't know how, I've got no way of checking that at this time. NB: the DVI-to-VGA connector still works, I am using the VGA input of the LCD panel right now.

Until that unfortunate incident I was able to use DVI with no problems at all - the BIOS, boot menu, DOS, etc. were working fine. Now - DVI's gone. Can anyone help?

PS1. I used nVidia 169.21 drivers when that happened.
PS2. I ran the native resolution of the LCD - 1280 x 1024 @ 75 Hz most of the times and the same resolution in the game when DVI went dead.