I had a problem like this once.  The problem was that the monitor was
feeding back a voltage to the video card and causing overheating and
eventual (days later) failure.  After replacing several video cards, we
placed
a fan to blow air over the chips on the card until customer could buy a new
monitor.

Don't know if this has a bearing on your problem, but it is just my
experience.

                         Hershel



>A client has a PII-266 computer (ATX case), with LX mobo, S/B sound
>card, Viper330 4Mb AGP video running win95 with lots of games. His video
>card has already failed four times since he bought the computer about
>year and half ago. I checked his computer, everything else is fine
>excapt the video, when boot up, the first post is to report the video
>memory - only 2Mb! then in win95, I can't change display setting any
>better than 640*480 16 Color. However, there is no problem shown in
>device manager. For test, I changed his video to a PCI card, everything
>was fine. I thought it might be a problem with win95, but his computer
>was taking AGP running without any problem. If it is a hardware problem,
>it's also hard to explain why 4 video cards failed in short time.
>

         The PCBUILD web site always needs good submissions.  If
          you would like to contribute to the website, send any
               hardware tech tips or hardware reviews to:
                           [log in to unmask]