Help save my monitor's life (config vs. hardware failure Q)

[Lazarus18]

I'm not really sure what is causing my problem. I will describe it, and give me theories, but expertise is sought.

I have a GeForce3 Ti 500 in my Gentoo/XP/Redhat box. I have emerged nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx. We had an old monitor that Redhat had in its list of possible monitors on install, so I selected it and went on my way. I copied the RH XF86cfg-4 to Gentoo /etc/X11 and all went well. Soon thereafter the monitor would start kind of popping. It would expand the screen image past the limits of the screen with this little popping noise and then quickly shrink back to fit. At first I thought maybe the monitor was old, and just needed to warm up or something. However it started happening more and more frequently, and eventually the monitor would do it every 5 minutes or so, and then ultimately it would just go black for awhile, and occasionally come back.

So we bought a new monitor. It is an Envision EN-910e. I also needed to reinstall RH, so I did, but this monitor is not in the list. So I just entered the sync ranges from the monitor specs manually. When I do so it kind of shimmies and shakes, not easy to read. In XP I found I had to tone the hertz down to 60 for it to be stable, at 85KHz and 70 etc it would do this shaking thing. So I kept picking things in the generic monitor setup until I found one that worked well. It had HorizSync 31.5-79.0 VertRefresh 50-90, which is lower than the supposed actual capabilities of the monitor (30-95 and 50-150 per the manual).

To my horror after a few days the monitor did the popping thing again. I can only assume that over time it will be crumped as well.

I don't know if it's my video card going bad, or something wrong with my X config. I don't recall it ever happening in XP, which makes me think it's the config, but then again I rarely use XP, and Gentoo is up all day.

If anyone has this monitor, or knows what causes these symptoms, please help me out before I burn up $200.

Sorry for the length
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-Rob, Tired med student
Powermac G4 450 MHz (Sawtooth), 756 MB RAM, OS X.1.4
Powerbook G3 400 MHz (Pismo), 192 MB RAM, OS X.1.4, Gentoo Linux
Homebrew Athlon-xp 1800+ MHz, 512 MB DDR-RAM, GeForce 3Ti 500, Gentoo Linux, WinXP

[pjp]

Could be your video card, but I wouldn't think a GF3 Ti500 would die this quickly. I can tell you what happened to me.

I had a 17" CTX monitor. I ran it at 1024x768 with a refresh rate of 105. Guess what... that killed it. Oh, it took about 12 months, but I'm certain that was the issue. I don't recall the exact specs, but what happened was, I drove the monitor too hard. Just because a monitor is capable of running at 105Hz for the refresh doesn't mean you should. Generally manufacturers will list Optimal or recommended settings. I'd go to their website to see what you can find if the manual doesn't list them. Once you find that data, compare it to what you are actually running.
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