Hi,

Here's my current setup:

MOBO - Abit IP35 E (BIOS 15 Beta 2)

HeatSink - Thermalright Ultima Extreme 120 with Scythe S-Flex 120mm Fan

RAM - Corsair 1x2GB PC2 6400 DDR2 800 MHz 5-5-5-18

PSU - Cooler Master Real Power 550W

Graphic Card - MSI NX 8600 GTS (nVidia Firmware 175.19)

OS - Win XP Pro SP3

HDD - WD 5000AAKS (500 GB)

The Problem:

I'm unable to watch any video or play any game. Anything with motion graphics makes my monitor go off. The rest of the machine remains ON though. As soon as I open a video in a media player or start my webcam, the monitor turns off.

The same nvidia drivers with the same gfx card were working fine on my previous mobo. Also, for example if I start COD4, the display turns off at the profile selection screen. After a couple of seconds the audio goes off too. This could mean that either the game is crashing as well or it's just that the audio's dying out along with the display.

Kindly advise as this is one crazy bugger of a problem

Have you done any OCing? It almost sounds like you are running into a power issue. The lower end Cooler Master psus are very bad (Tier 5) so it is likely this is the issue. If you have access to another psu to test with I would recommend it. The reason I say this is because watching videos and playing games load your graphics card and this would cause it to draw more power which your psu most likely can't handle so your gfx card dies temporarily.

Also, there are newer drivers available (177.92) which seem to have some pretty nice performance gains over previous drivers.

I haven't OC'ed at all. I'd definitely try another PSU but the same PSU was working on my previous mobo. I used to play Quake 3 & COD4 all day.

Your point makes sense because I can surf alright. I can surf the internet all day and nothing would happen. Also, I can watch videos on youtube but cannot run a video locally i.e. on a media player. Could you please link me up with the new drivers? I have a Geforce 8 series card and the latest release for them seems to be 175.19.

Link to newer drivers. They are stable so don't worry that they are beta.

What you could try is running everything with as little as hardware as possible and try underclocking your cpu (speed and voltage) and see if that helps, make sure you disable speedtstep if you do this. Since you haven't OCed at all speedstep (aka slowing your proc down) is still on; so my guess is that load your CPU up to full speed and power plus loading your gpu is probably stressing your PSU too much.

I could be wrong and it could be just a driver issue if so that is good news. If the driver doesn't help it is probably your psu.