Tyan S2932 and GTX295

[TheKnightWho]

Hello! I've been struggling for a while to get an nVidia GTX295 card to work in my Tyan S2932 (Thunder 3600M) board. Sometimes it will not post at all, and other times the motherboard will post but will only put display through the standard built-in VGA port even when the card is plugged in (it takes much longer in these cases than when the board isn't in). I only discovered this when the board displayed "00" in its little display indicating that everything was fine but still had nothing on the screen, so I plugged the monitor into the standard port and it displayed Windows booting up. Evidently it had some problem with the card and just ignored it.

The card itself is displaying the little green light indicating it has enough power and is fine (I have an 850W PSU and the 8-pin and 6-pin PCIe power connectors are both in place), and the system otherwise works normally. The card does not show up in the device manager, however, and the nVidia driver installer does not recognise it. Evidently the motherboard just pretends it doesn't exist.

I have a feeling this is something to do with the board only supporting PCI-e 1.1, but I have no problems getting an 8800GTS card to work and be completely stable (I had it run a BOINC project that used the CPU and GPU for a few days and it was absolutely fine) and from what I've read the GTX295 supports 1.1 without problems, so I'm not sure. Is it possible that the S2932 only runs PCI-e 1.1 8X mode through a 16X port or something else that would cause the card to refuse to work?

 

[Gordon Freeman]

Most likely that board has latency, bandwidth, driver and all around compatibility issues with the GTX 295 but at any rate that is a very very odd ball setup you have there so issues like this are to be expected when trying to use it out side of it's intended purpose.

 

[TheKnightWho]

Most likely that board has latency, bandwidth, driver and all around compatibility issues with the GTX 295 but at any rate that is a very very odd ball setup you have there so issues like this are to be expected when trying to use it out side of it's intended purpose.

Well I was mostly trying to set up a general purpose machine that allowed me to do some video encoding but which I could also game on. The card was given to me by a friend, so I'm not overly bothered if I can't get it to work, but it would be nice to. I just noticed that my BIOS is only v2.04 and that Tyan have v2.06 on their site, but the FTP server is down and I can't find any mirrors. Even stranger is that at the moment the board shouldn't even be able to support the Opteron 2427s I've got running in it at the moment since the AGESA version is too low, and that Tyan only introduced support for them with v2.06.

It might be possible that a BIOS update might fix it, since it could be some weird compatibility issue causing it due to it not officially supporting the CPUs at the moment. I won't be able to find out until Tyan sort out their servers, though.