Long story - and I just don't get it:

Friday night I picked up a BFG 8800GTS OC 512MB. Filled with glee I installed it and had a great time with it.

The next morning I went to fire up the PC and had no display whatsoever. After some whining I was able to discern that the system was infact booting, I merely could not see anything.

edit: To be clear - my monitor is not coming out of standby while the system is continuing on it's merry way. The monitor knows it's plugged into the card because it does not give me the "check cable message" that it does when I unplug it from the card. But it's not receiving a signal from the card, or at least doesn't think it is.

Reinstalled my 7900GTX, worked fine. Ok, defective card right? So I returned it and exchange it for a new one. Same thing. No POST errors (that I can hear), system would boot but I could not see anything. When the first 8800 was working fine, when I booted my PC up the fan would come on for a second and then slow down, but when this "issue" began the fan merely stayed on full blast without slowing down.

Called BFG Tech, he suggested a BIOS upgrade, which I did (and which caused a serious problem and had me reintalling the OS etc etc). No avail, card still acts the same. I was running XP Pro, and when that went South during the BIOS upgrade I figured what a prime opportunity to format and install this fresh copy of Vista.

I put the 7900GTX back in, and figured well, fine I'll just get an eVGA card instead. This morning the 8800GTS (G92) was out of stock for eVGA, so I figured I might as well get a 9800GTX, woohaa. As you can probably guess by now... I get the exact same thing with the 9800 card . eVGA man was scratching his head as well. He has suggested that possibly it's a slot incompatibility (mine is not PCIe 2, but the cards are supposed to be backwards compatible), both cards were PCIe 2... if that's the issue why on Earth did it work perfect for the first night?

Motherboard: Asus A8N-E
Power Supply: Enermax 485W (neither card indicated not enough power)

Ideas? Solutions? Perhaps a hypothesis?

Stupid computers.

All I can think is that, if your mobo is PCI-e 1.1 or above, that it could be the PSU.

No idea what else it could be, though.

I'd blame the PSU, 485W is the optimum range, but they can go over that for short amounts of time, however this can and does damage them, you could have baked your PSU so now it doesn't have the juice to power your bigger and badder card (hence why it worked once and not now), get your mits on a bigger PSU (from memory with the 9800 they recommend about 6-700w), if possible loan one from someone was you don't want to waste any more cash.

But I'd bet a pint that is the problem.

How many HDD's do you have?

What's the rest of your system spec?

(BTW a 9800GTX is massive overkill for any S939 based system)

I have one SATA hard drive.

I would think that if I fried the PSU that it wouldn't run this 7900 anymore either, but who knows. Even the 9800, with it's dual 6 pins connectors isn't showing me the "not enough power light" when I boot, and the fan still runs on the card etc so it's not totally shut down.

Yeah I know the card is overkill but even the 8800 made a big difference at the time and it's not much slow at all (apparantly) than this 9800. I can't upgrade the whole thing at once so I thought I'd get a vidcard first. What else do you want to know?

2GB ram (still PC3200 IIRC :P), S939 A64X2 4200+, one SATA hard drive, one DVDRAM drive... that's it.

Power supply is an Enermax Noisetaker II 485W, card says 450W is recommended (550 in SLI), so whilst I would just go get another PSU if that was the issue I just wonder because everything runs fine on the 7900GTX card; using that same 6 pin connector etc. I even think the recommendations were the same as far as what power this card wanted (450W, could be wrong. I know for sure I had to upgrade to use this card though.)

Thanks for the replies!

edit: how can I find out if the PCI-E slot is 1.1 (or 1.1a)? CPU-Z doesn't tell me, and the specs I can find on the web for the old board don't show...

You must send it to me for further analysis!

The only way you can find out is Google - To run a PCI-e 2 card you need a PCI-e 16x 1.1 lane or better - some mobo's (specifically a VIAKT800 chipset & cheap-o 915/925 Intel chipsets) run 1.0's which wont work.

I asked about HDD's as when you boot up they all use the max power spinning up - on some PC's with lots of HDD's this can be crippling (expensive RAID cards will stagger spin-ups for this very reason).

I really think you'd need more than 485w for that car, but nVidia knw better than me. I'd look into the amperage that's recommended for your card and then look at the amperage your PSU throws out.

BTW - There is no "low power light" (that i'm aware of) - the only thing on the card that will show you anything besides the port on the back is the onboard speaker (on all 8800/9800 cards iirc) that shrieks when you don't put all the power plugs in.

Quote from Jakg :

BTW - There is no "low power light" (that i'm aware of) - the only thing on the card that will show you anything besides the port on the back is the onboard speaker (on all 8800/9800 cards iirc) that shrieks when you don't put all the power plugs in.

This also applies if everything is plugged in to the card, but it's simply not getting enough amperage. Ball, I'd suggest finding a new PSU if you want to keep your 8800/9800.

Just in case your wondering if it's making the noise or not and you can't hear it - trust me, you will.

My Dad tried building a PC with an 8800GTS in it a few months ago and made the same mistake. I heard it around 6 rooms away while i'm in an outbuilding with all the doors closed. Thank funk I knew what to do to fix it!

Ball, PSUs fry in different ways, I've had one that just popped its clogs and couldn't even turn over my system fans, I've had another that would only boot if I under clocked my CPU to about half speed, and one that would only boot if I either removed a stick of ram or a HDD.

Point is different PSUs will go in different ways, and I still maintain that is your problem, so swop it to one with more balls and I'll put a pint on the fact that will fix it.

Quote from Ball Bearing Turbo :

Called BFG Tech, he suggested a BIOS upgrade, which I did (and which caused a serious problem and had me reintalling the OS etc etc). No avail, card still acts the same. I was running XP Pro, and when that went South during the BIOS upgrade I figured what a prime opportunity to format and install this fresh copy of Vista.

Do a "restore setup defaults" in bios, just to be sure every thing is ok there. I had to do that in one of the latest bios updates for my Asus M2N board, or else it would just bluescreen on Windows boot, or even freeze the computer when staying in bios for more than 30 seconds.

Quote from spankmeyer :

You must send it to me for further analysis!

LOL, if you'd asked yesterday I probably would've sent the whole thing to you postage paid. There was colourful profanity involved yesterday.

Quote from Jakg :

The only way you can find out is Google - To run a PCI-e 2 card you need a PCI-e 16x 1.1 lane or better - some mobo's (specifically a VIAKT800 chipset & cheap-o 915/925 Intel chipsets) run 1.0's which wont work.

I'll keep looking. I guess it must be 1.1 because it ran the first card for awhile.

Quote :

I asked about HDD's as when you boot up they all use the max power spinning up - on some PC's with lots of HDD's this can be crippling (expensive RAID cards will stagger spin-ups for this very reason)

AH, ok, well that makes sense. When I had installed the first card I had three hard drives installed, 1 SATA and two regular old PATA drives which I ditched yesterday. So that could've caused a problem!

Quote :

BTW - There is no "low power light" (that i'm aware of) - the only thing on the card that will show you anything besides the port on the back is the onboard speaker (on all 8800/9800 cards iirc) that shrieks when you don't put all the power plugs in.

On this card there is a light according to the tech support. Indeed, when I forgot to plug in the 6 pin during my 400 swap outs yesterday, I was aquainted quite frighteningly with that shreik on the 8800 cards. I thought there as a banshee in the PC causing these problems. On the 9800 GTX (at least on the eVGA version) apparantly there's an LED near the front of the heatsink. It doesn't light up.

Quote from h3adbang3r :

This also applies if everything is plugged in to the card, but it's simply not getting enough amperage. Ball, I'd suggest finding a new PSU if you want to keep your 8800/9800.

I'm leaning that direction....

Quote from P5YcHoM4N :

Ball, PSUs fry in different ways, I've had one that just popped its clogs and couldn't even turn over my system fans, I've had another that would only boot if I under clocked my CPU to about half speed, and one that would only boot if I either removed a stick of ram or a HDD.

Point is different PSUs will go in different ways, and I still maintain that is your problem, so swop it to one with more balls and I'll put a pint on the fact that will fix it.

Hm, interesting. I guess you might just be right.

I've also seen folks on the web that had no problems running PCIE2 cards on this motherboard... I guess I need ANOTHER new power supply. They should just supply them when you buy current high end cars, if that's what this is then that's the 2nd vidcard in a row that I've had to upgrade a PSU for :gnasher:

Quote from arco :

Do a "restore setup defaults" in bios, just to be sure every thing is ok there. I had to do that in one of the latest bios updates for my Asus M2N board, or else it would just bluescreen on Windows boot, or even freeze the computer when staying in bios for more than 30 seconds.

When I flashed the BIOS it was set to restore defaults. Unfortunately the intelligently designed ASUS update program bastardized one of my drives (at the time there was 3 remember) MBRs and I could not boot without using a bootable CD... If I just had the CD I could boot from the hard drive, but if no CD was present the machine would not boot (BOOT FAILURE INSERT SYSTEM DISK)... Which was why I spend yesterday ditching the older drives and reformatting this one and installing Vista etc... But I digress. BIOS is the newest version.

Thats the worst advice ever.

Seriously - if your knowledge is less than the OP in the area they need help in - why post?

Quote from Jakg :

Thats the worst advice ever.

Seriously - if your knowledge is less than the OP in the area they need help in - why post?

We assume that post is to arco??

Quote from MR_B :

We assume that post is to arco??

It was to piggy, he deleted his post in shame.

Quote from MR_B :

We assume that post is to arco??

No, piggy501, who has since deleted his post.

Quote from Bob Smith :

No, piggy501, who has since deleted his post.

Cant you undelete it?

It was to piggy who said "go to Alienware and spend [insert ludicrous amount here] and then u will not need to fix it lol".

LOL.

Ok, well, my current PSU despite being only 485W has 2 12v rails at 22A each. Which was the reason I got it over the 500W units at the time since total watts doesn't really matter as much as what current it can deliver on +12s for GPUs.

IE, there is a 600W PSU I could buy tomorrow but it has 4x 18A +12 rails which does me no good, and from my understanding wouldn't power my GPU as well as my "wimpy" 485W unit. The 8800 card said:

> 425W PCI Express-compliant system power supply with a combined 12V current rating of 28A or more (Minimum system power requirement based on a standard PC configured with an Intel® Core™2 Extreme X6800 processor)

Why it's concerned about a combined 12V rating I don't know, but it would've had 44A worth combined with my PSU.

The 9800 card states:

- Minimum of a 450 Watt power supply. (Minimum recommended power supply with +12 Volt current rating of 24 Amp Amps.)

That better not be on one rail, because nothing I've even seen so far has 24 or more amps on one rail. And what the hell is an "Amp Amp"?

After reading this...
http://www.techjamaica.com/forums/showthread.php?t=52054
WTF? Who are these highend cards designed for? I don't get it.

IN any event, from my understanding this PSU should've been more than enough to run that 8800... Am I wrong? Please tell me yes, and preferably tell me that I can just use a 600W power supply and put my head in the sand, and my PC will boot with a 9800GTX actually showing me something on the screen.. bah...

Quote from Jakg :

It was to piggy who said "go to Alienware and spend [insert ludicrous amount here] and then u will not need to fix it lol".

What n00by advice. Why spend thousands of pounds on alienware when you can build it yourself from your own parts. For a lot less cheaper. On a side note, Quoting what someone says can really help sometimes.

If your PSU is capable of what it says on the sticker, and with Enermax that should pretty much be the case, its plenty powerfull. It could just about do SLI as well.

From a 7900GTX to a 8800GTS you're only drawing a couple of dozen more watts. Assuming you've got a single core 939 athon64, the total powerdraw of the system with everything fully stressed will struggle to go over 260 watts DC.

Here's the pure GFX card power draw compared:


102 vs 84W .. can't be the psu unless something odd is going on!

He doesn't have a GTS320, he has a highly overclocked re-badged 8800GTS 512...

It's a Dualcore AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+.

The 8800GTS 512 wasn't really rebadged, it was the G92 core not the G80. I guess rebadged in the sense that they reused that moniker since with the G92 version it wound up where is was supposed to in their line up.

See, going to a 4 12V rail PSU at 18A each just CAN'T be un upgrade from a 2 12V x 22A PSU, even though it's 600W compared to 485W from my understanding.

This sucks, I'm just confused; this PSU really should be OK but maybe it's not. It can't be the PCIE slot version because it worked for a night... ARGH.

9800GTX = Fettled G92 Core = Re-badged, tweaked 8800GTS 512 IMO.

Do you leave your monitor on standby when your PC is turned off? I had the same problem for a short time - I had to turn the PC/monitor on in a specific order or I wouldn't have an image... It went away, and to this day I don't know what the problem was...