915P-A 1.1 no video to pci-e slot

[thistownsucksnj]

I was wondering if anyone could help me or had experienced a similar problem. I have a ECS 915P-A mobo that I've been trying to get ready for my Ex's father since Christmas. I've tried several times to contact ECS in regards o my issue but I haven't even recieved an e-mail from them. When I got the parts in and set up the system there was a major problem (I felt) where whenever a cmos entry was saved (ie date\time, the mobo wouldn't boot... no display nothing. at the time I thought it was my 9200 card not being fully compatable with the agp-express slot so I promptly returned it and ordered the new card. I used an old NVIDIA 32 but card to set up the system (just clearing the cmos everytime I booted so that it would boot) I got the most recent flash for the motherboard and it fixed the problem with saving cmos settings. The problem I have now is my ATI Radeon x600 has arrived and the bios just isn't seeing it or something... I have adjusted the cmos setting to attempt the PCI-E slot first for video but it hasn't worked the computer will only recognise agp and pci cards and I really don't want to take the loss in bandwidth because this board SHOULD support this card.

the system is a P4 3.0 w\hyperthreading Intel fan supplied
ECS 915P-A motherboard in all it's pretty and purple

Radeon x600 pro pci-e video card

512 pc 3200 400mhz ddr2 TWIN MOS

450 watt power supply 24-pin connector

120gb maxtor hd ATA-133

Lite-on cd burner

3.5" drive

I know that there were reviews on this site regarding testing this particular MOBO and there didn't seem to be any problems listed in the tests and I consider myself to be well above average when it comes to these sorts of things but I am truely desperate for some good advice....

another note was that I booted with a pci card to windows xp and xp couldn't see the PCI-E card either

 

[pat]

wooo hooo!! slowly here.

Your board support PCIe video card or old PCI videocard. if you put an AGP videocard (the 9200 maybe?) in the non existant agp express slot..then you did something terribly wrong and PCIe and AGP are not compatible. So if it is the case, then your PCIe slot for the video card might be just DEAD.

So tell us the the 9200 was not AGP??

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

 

[thistownsucksnj]

http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20041027/elitegroup-01.html

is the review on this particular mobo. According to this anyone should be able to use the agp-express slot with compatable agp cards until they can afford to upgrade to a pci-e card (provided that is what they want to do). Right? or is there something I missed... BTW thank you for your reply

 

[pat]

Well, I guess that it it some kind ok kwirk that you should expect from a board doing thing that they are not supposed..I would try to check if your power supply is up the task. I've seen 450w cheap PSU not even capable to boot my AMD 2500+ mobile higher that 9X200 MHz (1.8GHz) while my branded 420W make it happy running at 12.5x200MHz (2.5 GHz). Maybe the GPU is not enough powered and fail to initialize.

Else, I would try to unplug the power from the wall, remove the battery, install the PCIe card while waiting for 4-5 minutes, then plug it back and start it just to check. You could try to unplug the HDD and CDROM and floppy to have only the videocard, the ram and the CPU on the board.

Else..I dont know.

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

 

[thistownsucksnj]

lol that's the exact setup I was testing last night... just the mobo, processor fan, and a 3 1\2" drive powered by the system. I'm relatively certain that this power supply would be up to the task (it did give adequate power for a 9200 with all the other devices connected). Thank you very much though for replying. It's funny because my MOBO manufacturer finally replied but they said to ask ATI about the problem and ATI is telling me to ask ECS.

When you looked aty the link I posted before you can see that there are serious disadvantages to running this board with an agp card (cuts performance almost in 1\2)

Thank you for responding... this is truely a nightmare and I really wish I had another PCI-E mobo and card to test to know for sure if the bios is just failing to see it because the card doesn't work.

I don't really see any reason why this card would have been doa though. It's in its retail box all packaged propper and looking fit... but than again so was the mobo.

I can understand getting a mobo with a BIOS that needs to be flashed to accept current hardware, but this mobo came with a bios that needed to be flashed to write too the CMOS at all (including just date& time). They finally did write to me with a case # so I will be contacting them by phone today (calling cali) to see if this issue can be resolved.