Monitor blackouts/Shutdown

Hey folks. I've run into a rather interesting problem recently. Been playing Guild Wars sinc retail flawlessly on an ABS Mayhem Laptop (Athlon clocking around 3.4, a gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9700 128 MB card). Lately though, I've been running into a problem where after about 15 minutes of play, my monitor blacks out entirely/shuts off. At one point I tried walking away from the PC and coming back, and a few minutes later found that the screen had returned, but was frozen and rippling. I thought it may have been humidity considering my loft gets fairly warm, but even with A/C up, it seems no good.

I got out of work too late to give ABS a call today, but I'd figured I'd ask around here and see what anyone else thought of it.

can you monitor your system temps while playing and let us know what your CPU/GPU and Motherboard temps are. Laptops are notorously bad for gaming due to the incredibly amount of heat they produce....and without any real way to disperse that heat hardware components tend to get very very hot.

You could test with the graphics effects turned down and see if that gets you any longer performance.

I play GW for hours on my IBM T42 and it works like a champ, although I can keep my coffee warm when I place it near the vent. :-)

This one's been pretty solid for gaming, and was constructed/retailed for that purpose anyway. I've run both Half Life 2 and Guild Wars on it for hours at a time, and had zero problems. Its only recently that this has surfaced, which is why I'm perplexed, considering I play less at length than I did when I first picked up the game.

As for system temps, I'll check into that shortly. It doesn't seem to be getting particularly hot, though, and its running atop a cooling unit. It certainly warms up noticeably, but not to the searingly hot level I've seen laptops reach and start erroring at.

Are you SURE it's the monitor? That is to say, do you know if the video card is still rendering the image, but the monitor isn't displaying it?

Its definitely still rendering the image, as evidenced by example where I mentioned the image reappearing after some seconds. Other situations, the entire PC has shut down shortly thereafter.

However, it seems I may have Occam's Razored myself, as it appears the fault my lie with the fact that my cooling pad's fans have apparently ceased all option. Apparently having the A/C on left me unable to hear the fact that I've been getting no fan noise.

I believe I have been well and duly 'p0wnt'. Heh.