An Odd Occurrence Every Once in a While

[RAMtheSSD]

So there I am working away, making the keyboard happy by clicking away at the keys and suddenly, my monitor just goes dark! I have the base Nvidia Gforce 120 (So it will get replaced in time but, ideally, not yet $$) and the temperature is never over 100 F - great ventilation, cold apartment, and SMC fan control and noise cancellation headphones. The Monitor is an ASUS MT276 (LED driven LCD 27 inch) and heretofore, it has been nothing but excellent. While the monitor is on almost all the time I am awake, it does go to sleep and return from sleep with no problem. The monitor is about 2 years old but probably a bit less.

Overall, the monitor is cool to the touch and there is a very small (warmer) difference in temperature towards the upper left of the screen but nothing seems amiss otherwise until...

Any ideas? Monitor or video card trouble?

 

[Tesselator]

When it goes dark does it also come back on sometimes too?

Is the mac still running or does it seem frozen up as well?

 

[Macsonic]

Not sure if this solves the issue. Have you tried removing the videocard and replacing it? Also airblow the card? In my former company, one of the Mac Pro's monitor screen went black but the computer is still running. I just removed the card, cleaned it a bit and reinstalled it. Also had the interior dusted off. And all was fine after that.

 

[RAMtheSSD]

Tessalator: sorry I took so long to reply, life took a bit of a detour The machine continues to work fine. Except for the blacking out of the monitor, it is as if I never left -so, I could be typing and if ignored the blacking out, the words do appear on the page latter. I think it may be related to the auto shutdown function in XBMC (no need to distinguish between FLAC and MP3 or M4a etc and video without restrictions, what's not to like, right? ) and I have turned it off. However, it has been particularly cold here lately so I have to wait for it to warm up a bit to see if that has anything to do with it.

Macsonic: I blew it out about two months ago and the video card was surprisingly clean. I have pulled some in my time that the fan had burned out because the clod of dirt had stopped the fan altogether. Nevertheless, it is a valid suggestion and one that is free so why not? I'll let you know how it goes.

Does either one of you think there is any chance that it could be the monitor? I do not believe so but until I figure out where the Mini to DVI adapter is at, I can't use my MBP to test the monitor. However, it does pass all the tests with the Mac Pro so ??

The Video Card current temperature is 99 F and ambient is around 70 F.

 

[RAMtheSSD]

Problem Seems to have Gone Away!!!

So the problem would appear to be setting XBMC to put display to sleep when Idle followed by the program shutting down sometime latter. Somehow, this does not mean just when the machine is idle. Apparently, it means when XBMC is idle regardless of the machine's actual state. So, I turned off that setting but kept the setting for the program to self terminate and the problem went away.

I guess that this was a kind of operator error because I thought "when idle...hmmm so it will check the machine state..." it may well do that but if it does, it is doing it after it turns off the monitor.

 

[Tesselator]

So the problem would appear to be setting XBMC to put display to sleep when Idle followed by the program shutting down sometime latter. Somehow, this does not mean just when the machine is idle. Apparently, it means when XBMC is idle regardless of the machine's actual state. So, I turned off that setting but kept the setting for the program to self terminate and the problem went away.

I guess that this was a kind of operator error because I thought "when idle...hmmm so it will check the machine state..." it may well do that but if it does, it is doing it after it turns off the monitor.

Huh, weird. Well, glad ya got it sorted!