The tail of two graphics cards(Upgrading insanity)

[sitingduck]

My 2 year old computer sports a amd 3500+, asus a8n-e M/B, and a gforce 6600 gcard.
After bitter experience over the 2 years I have come to realize the week and pathetic link is the g card. So I buy a 2 month old Forsa Gforce 8600 gt from a friend who is leaving the country.

The problem is that after changing the cards and supplying power the system fails to beep or do anything. After trying a few time it would work but after installing drivers and rebooting it would play dead again. Or it would just get past the post beeping once and then restarting.

At first a thought it wasn’t getting sufficient power but it has no extra power connections.

Now I’m running the system with the original g card with only the dream of the better performance the new card would supply.

Thanx for reading. Hope you can give me some direction.

 

[g-paw]

I'm currently running an 8600GT on an ASUS A8N-SLI mobo so that mobo should be able to run it. Have you tried updating the BIOS? Have you tried the card in a different machine? Not sure if it was the 8600 but recently on a clean install of Windows I had to load the drivers that came with the card on a CD and then upgrade the drivers from nVidia. Have you tried both the mfg driver as well as those from nVidia? If none of this works, post this under Graphics and Displays or Home Built, like more responses