Random monitor switch offs

[sling-shot]

I am seeing my monitor switch off randomly in both Linux and Windows either during boot or short while post boot.

I have an old AMD Athlon X2 3600+ CPU with Frontech N68 motherboard. Recently installed a noname RAID card (only 2 SATA ports on motherboard hence no option for extra hard drive without). It says something like promise technology.

Boot loader is GRUB.

During initial boot I see this:
*slimgur.com/images/2015/06/21/16cc5c6d7c84120d96d6d166f6c12f5f.png

 

[topgear]

is the monitor running stable once windows / linux fully loads and is in desktop mode for a long time ?

 

[sling-shot]

No. At most it stays on for few minutes in desktop.

 

[topgear]

then I think the issue is with the monitor itself. For testing disconnect the monitor from PC [ signal cable ] and let it run. The monitor will run into test mode but do keep in mind some monitors has certain standby timeout when no singnal cable is connected. They will go into standby mode just after say 5 minutes on testing mode.

 

[sling-shot]

I will test this. But I forgot to tell another thing. This behaviour was seen a week back. I had opened the cabinet, checked all cables and then it became normal for a few days.

 

[sling-shot]

Turns out it was the video card which was playing truant. During initial power on the fan did spin up but looks like it stops spinning after sometime due to unknown reason. The entirety of cooling fins around the fan were covered in dust. I thought may be this was causing the GPU to overheat.

Then I cleaned the whole thing with Isopropyl Alcohol (thought there is nothing to lose anyway as this is HD4670 long out of support in Linux and not much better under Windows too). After the cleaning it worked for few minutes and then stopped output altogether again. However this time when I changed the VGA port to onboard I got display. Now I have disabled the video card in BIOS and selected onboard nVidia GeForce 6150SE GPU which is not even good enough for HD video forget any gaming.

I have tried to get PCLinuxOS to select a lower than FullHD resolution for the monitor but I have not succeeded yet. Not tried booting Windows XP still.