What motherboards are compatible with a 6950 HD?

Joe 1269

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May 1, 2012
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Just made an amatuer mistake, after months of looking and saving, I bought a sapphire 6950 HD and THEN find out it's not compatible with my old mother board? The really bad news is I over shot my budget to get this card. But in the event I can magically make money appear, I would upgrade my motherboard and hope my other old stuff works with it. Suggestions??
 
What motherboard do you have that it's not compatible with a 6950? I'd expect it to be compatible with almost everything made within the last 6 or 7 years.

If you upgrade your motherboard, then you will probably also need to upgrade your CPU and RAM if you want a motherboard that will work with the 6950. Altogether, that would probably cost around $325 to $400 or so.
 

Joe 1269

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May 1, 2012
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I am sorry, I meant 7950 HD... I will check the details on the mother board. I know it's a Zotac. It's about 8 years old. It has an Intel Quad Core 2??, 2.4 Ghz.. I will verify the CPU and motherboard and send the specs. Thanks so much for the help!
 
That CPU would be a huge bottleneck even if it the 7950 was working. Even then, the 7950 should work on that board... That it doesn't means that your board's BIOS doesn't support it. You can check for a BIOS update from the motherboard's manufacturer, but that's probably not going to help.

An Intel Core 2 Quad in a motherboard that is eight years old? I'm assuming that this was an old motherboard and you just put the new CPU into it because the Core 2 architecture is only six years old and Core 2 Quads are only like four years old, at the oldest.

You best option would probably be to either get a Sandy Bridge motherboard with an i5 and 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz RAM (two 4GB modules), or maybe you can get a newish LGA 775 board with DDR3 support and still get the same memory, but also get a CPU cooler that can handle your CPU at like 4GHz or so. It would still be a bottleneck then and it might not even be able to go that high, so I'd get the newer Sandy Bridge parts if I were you.
 

Joe 1269

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May 1, 2012
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Ok, thank you guys! Miraculously got the card working, thank God. I am not sure how. My PC guru friend could not shut off the on board GPU - it wasn't an option, he said the board was incompatible, too old. I then took it home and somehow got it too work, wish I knew exactly how. I swapped cards back and forth and it worked.
So, new problem, BF3 freezes after about a minute of being loaded up into a game. It seems to work well with COD Black Ops and BF2, two old favorite games, but not BF3, which is what i bought the card for!! i went to Sapphire and updated the drivers. I turned off about 4 Nvidea video drivers and a Realtek sound driver because 3 sound drivers were running; AMD, Nvidea and Realtek. (I don't have sound without the Nvidea driver, so I left it), and I am making an assumption the AMD sound driver is from the video card, running through the HDMI port which is not hooked up. I tried to update the Mobo but could not – didn’t find that available. I went into the bios and turned the onboard GPU from on to - off if another card is present or something like that. BF3 still freezes after about a minute.
I am going to try reloading Origin and/or BF3 next, see if that works. I am open to any suggestions. I truly appreciate the feedback. One more thing, I could be off on the 8 year old comment, the PC is eight years old but I am not sure when stuff was upgraded as I got the PC from a friend – nothing seems to be OEM, so it should be no older than 8 years old and maybe as new as 6 years(?) Thanks again for the advice!
OS = Vista Business 32 bit
CPU = Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.40GHz
RAM = Corsair 4 GB dual channel DDR2 @ 400 Mhz
Motherboard = Nvidea MCP7A (socket 775)
Video Card = Sapphire HD 7950 (OC edition 900 MHz)
PSU = 650 Watt Rosewill
 

Joe 1269

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May 1, 2012
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Found the answer - it's working so far anyway - just had one game in BF3 that lasted longer than 1 minute without freezing - it was 16 minutes long and ended without a freeze. So here's what I did; right clicked on the BF3 icon, clicked on properties, clicked on the compatibility tab, clicked on that little box next to; "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" then I rolled back the options there to Windows 2000... clicked on apply. I immediately tried BF3 and it worked. Someone said to just roll it back one and try it... I have Vista and that compatibility button was not even on... Thank you for your help.. Peace out!! PS: the HD 7950 is looking great. My game did not have that lag and notchy look as it did before. So far so good!