Can a graphics card kill an LCD display?

[Tim]

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 09:19 -0500, Jack Howarth wrote:
> Viewsonic will repair this unit again. However i am very concerned that I have 
> had two identical failures on different units. Is it possible for the Radeon 
> card to kill a LCD display? I have been told that cards can short and damage 
> a LCD but that fact that I see a green lit led on the monitor when attached 
> to the 9600's DVI port suggests the signal is getting through but that the 
> circuitry that drives the image display of the card is dead. Is it possible 
> that a card can randomly freak out and overdrive the display circuitry on a 
> DVI connection damaging the display? I thought LCDs were immune to such damage
> since they don't use flyback transformers.

I can't see how the card could damage a monitor, through your choice of
display settings.  LCD monitors don't work like CRT ones (with an EHT
generated from the horizonal output, so the horizontal output must only
run at predetermined frequencies; or for those with independent EHT
generation, the same situation applies to only generated horizontal
output at predetermined frequencies suitable for the monitor).  All that
should happen if your had settings miss-set should be no picture or
disrupted images.

Shorting out the pins on the video plug to the monitor shouldn't do
anything, there's no voltages coming from the monitor to the plug.
Broken pins in your cabling could be a reason you have no picture.

If you had a faulty video card, that could cause faults in a monitor,
though considering your video card's only going to have the ability to
put 5 Volts on a pin, maximum, I'd have thought a monitor wouldn't
suffer severe problems if it got 5VDC where it didn't expect it, other
than perhaps straight to a ground connection.  Perhaps you could
consider sending the card back with the monitor.  But it does seem like
you might be running into bad luck with crap monitors from the supplier.

Did they give you a report on what was really wrong with the previously
returned monitor?

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