RADEON X300 Intermittent Resolution Switching

[fopetesl]

Hardware: ASUS M2V; ATHLON 3500+; 1GB DDR2; 250GB Seagate SATA;
ATI RADEON X300.

I have used the card, (a gift from my son - a gamer), happily for nearly three months without a problem in both XP and LINUX.
The other day in XP the screen went blank (black) and XP eventually rebooted.
After some experiments I discovered in LINUX that the card appears to be randomly switching H & V sync frequencies. In LINUX the desktop blacked out and the monitor came up with

Code: Select all

 ... out of range
H:91.2KHz V:170.2Hz

so I switched to a console .. OK screen fine. Switched back to GUI and bingo! Screen back up again.
Had to do this several times then it settled down -- for five hours, yet.
Over the last couple of days the problem got apparently worse sometimes not even able to boot.
I upgraded the X300 drivers - no change.
I unloaded the drivers and am using XP's native drivers without any failures though screen refresh is really poor.
So. Am I looking at an X300 hardware failure? X300 firmware failure?
Motherboard failure?
Any clues, please?

[DMB2000uk]

If the problem is in both OS's and the card has been OK till now, it sounds like the card is going bad (hardware).

Not much you can do to fix that... time for a new card methinks... x300's are pretty cheap now if you want to just straight swap it.

Dan

[fopetesl]

Well DMB, I guess you're right so I have just gone ahead an bought an
MSI NVIDIA Fanless 7300GT.
Hope it lasts longer than the X300

[DMB2000uk]

Yeah, don't forget new cards have warantees so you'll be fine.

Dan

[fopetesl]

will LYK the result.
Anyone want an X300 heatsink?