Both Monitor and graphics card died : What came first?

[booneatl]

First of all, thank you for this great resource of a website ! I am a new member and this is my first post. I found the site via google while searching for a fix for my Samsung Syncmaster 225BW monitor. I am not tech savy but I did build my own system and am not afraid to open the box and play around.

I built my system in 2003 and it has been stable and running every day. Yes, I am looking to build new soon.

Both my graphics card and monitor died on the same day. Did one cause the other ? I don't believe in coincidence when it comes to these type of electronics.

The chain of events is: In the AM I noticed that burning, wire smell in my office. I had been doing a lot of printing so I just thought it was the printer. I came home and the computer was shut down. I always leave it on but this happens from time to time as the motherboard needs new caps as well. It would not power up; I had a new power supply and replaced it thinking this would solve the problem. Still would not boot. I unplugged every device connected to the power supply and started with one at a time. It worked fine with everything until I plugged up the graphics card and then it would shut down power.

Ordered a cheap graphics card to get me by and dug out my mothers computer. Then, the monitor would not stay on. It had all of the symptoms of the forum thread for the Samsung SyncMaster 225BW. I took it apart and it had oozing capacitors and bloated ones as well. None of the capacitors actually exploded.

I have fixed the monitor thanks to this forum but my question is did one device cause the other to fail or was this a coincidence ? Any ideas?

I built this in September 2003 and leave it on 24/7.

AMD Athlon XP Barton 2500+ 1.833 Socket A
ASUS A7N8X Deluxe
Corsair XMS 512 MB DDR 400 replaced w/ 2-1GB G-skill DDR 400
Windows XP Home
Maxtor diamond 120GB 7200 rpm sata
Antec 380 w power supply replaced in 2007 w/ Thermaltake 430 w

I have replaced the graphics card several times but this is the one that recently failed:

SAPPHIRE 100175L Radeon X1650PRO 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 AGP 4X/8X

My next task is replacing the caps on my motherboard !

Thank you,

David

[tom66]

Re: Both Monitor and graphics card died : What came first?

I've not known a graphics card (or any attached peripheral) to cause caps to bloat. Samsung used poor quality capacitors in expensive monitors, so it's not really a surprise they bulged. I have a DVB-S receiver with two bulged caps on the PSU, it still works fine (for how long though is the question) - the caps may have been failed for a while and are continuing to drift out of spec until they are completely failed.

[booneatl]

Re: Both Monitor and graphics card died : What came first?

I agree Tom that the caps were bad to begin with. It seemed odd that both devices failed on the same day after smelling smoke. I was not sure if some type of power surge killed both at the same time or if it was just a coincidence. I don't know enough about electrical components to come to any conclusion. Thank you for the reply.