- Dec 26, 2009
- 6
- 0
- 18,510
A week ago, I asked for some advice here after my old 7900GS suddenly died. The feedback I got was very helpful and reassuring, confirming my suspicions that PCI-E 2.0 was backwards compatible and as a result, I determined that a 9600GT I'd purchased was faulty since it was producing strange vertical bands on screen. I returned that card for a refund and instead purchased a BFG 9800GT 512MB with EcoIntelligence.
I tried to install it today and despite the fact that my machine easily meets the minimum spec, it still won't accept a PCI-E 2.0 card. I tried starting the machine up and got a blank screen. It then beeped at me, one long and three short which I believe is a GPU issue on my board.
I then replaced it with the 7100GS I've been using as a stopgap and discovered that the previous attempt to boot with the new card had actually reached some stage of loading Windows XP because there was a message saying that Windows had been unable to start due to a hardware issue.
The motherboard is an ASUS M2V I purchased in August 2007, using the VIA K8T890 chipset (I was trying to work out which BIOS revision I had). From searching the internet, it appears that some VIA chipsets seem to work with Nvidia graphics cards from the 8/9 series. Both BFG and ASUS tech support have said that it should work, but it clearly doesn't. Have I just been incredibly unlucky and been sent two faulty graphics cards, or is there an underlying issue?
I have no idea why my machine is doing this and am starting to think that I might as well change the motherboard anyway. The case is somewhat small but does fit an ATX motherboard. I'm on a budget of around £50 max for a new mainboard if I have to, so can anyone suggest a good AM2 mainboard that won't break the bank; I'm a student and I have a "cashflow issue".
I tried to install it today and despite the fact that my machine easily meets the minimum spec, it still won't accept a PCI-E 2.0 card. I tried starting the machine up and got a blank screen. It then beeped at me, one long and three short which I believe is a GPU issue on my board.
I then replaced it with the 7100GS I've been using as a stopgap and discovered that the previous attempt to boot with the new card had actually reached some stage of loading Windows XP because there was a message saying that Windows had been unable to start due to a hardware issue.
The motherboard is an ASUS M2V I purchased in August 2007, using the VIA K8T890 chipset (I was trying to work out which BIOS revision I had). From searching the internet, it appears that some VIA chipsets seem to work with Nvidia graphics cards from the 8/9 series. Both BFG and ASUS tech support have said that it should work, but it clearly doesn't. Have I just been incredibly unlucky and been sent two faulty graphics cards, or is there an underlying issue?
I have no idea why my machine is doing this and am starting to think that I might as well change the motherboard anyway. The case is somewhat small but does fit an ATX motherboard. I'm on a budget of around £50 max for a new mainboard if I have to, so can anyone suggest a good AM2 mainboard that won't break the bank; I'm a student and I have a "cashflow issue".
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