Not sure what happened. It seems that my MSI GeForce FX 5900XT has stopped displaying the color red. Everything appears very blue. When I tried to go into the color adjustment, green and blue showed up, but when i choose red, the little display in the nvidia settings goes black. I am using an LCD monitor, and I am pretty sure it is not the monitor because the device’s test pattern uses yellow. this really puts a crimp in my HL2: Deathmatch style.
has anyone heard of this problem before?
have i correctly disgnosed the prob?
is there a way to fix it, other than a new vga card?
Pull the VGA cable off the video card connector and check for broken or dirty pins. If there’s broken pins there’s not much you can but have it repaired. If there are dirty pins, use a Q-tip and some tape head cleaner or acetone to clean them. Reseat the connector and see if the problem goes away. It sounds like a connector or data cable problem to me. It could even be just a loose connector, so just pulling it, reseating and tightening it might fix it.
Occasionally a pin inside the VGA cable is bent. You can straighten them but it requires a fairly narrow pair of needle nose pliers. You hare to go very slowly and only straighten it a little bit at a time, or the pin will fatigue and snap off.
I pulled the cable and blew out the plugs on cable, LCD, and card with canned air. upon replugging, everything was red. this caused a moment of confusion until i realized that I had adjusted the setting to compensate for no red, and when i chose “revert to hardware defaults” everything was back to normal. thanks for the help with a dummie’s question, guys.