Gigabyte ga-a55m-ds2 - dead PCI slot?

[aspartame]

Okay so i've been having trouble installing my sound card into the 1 available PCI slot on this board (gigabyte ga-a55m-ds2). I'm running XP sp3, AMD a4 3300 apu. I have an audigy that I tried installing...windows detected it & says its installed and working. However, no matter what I do, I get no sound activity. So I tried another card, an old soundblaster pci 512....same result. Windows says its installed, but it doesn't work.

I just updated BIOS and am out of ideas...could it be the PCI slot is damaged or something? unfortunately I don't have anymore PCI cards to try I don't think....what else could it be if its not a damaged slot? Are these cards just too old?????? or are gigabyte boards known to be faulty like this? I want to hope its just a bios setting or something simple to fix.....guess I should RMA it?...............

 

[aspartame]

Update: Found an old but working Kingston Ethernet card and put it to the test. Put it in the slot, XP recognized it right away & installed the drivers. Used this card in another PC a few weeks ago with no issues. Anyway, once the card was in and windows recognized it, the green lights on the slot lit up. Looked like it was good to go. I put the Ethernet cable in. Nope. Getting a "network cable is unplugged" error. So that makes 3 working cards all experiencing similar quirky issues with this PCI slot. I'm all out of ideas so I'm proceeding with a little RMA action.