PCI Video Card
Anyone have a PCI video card I could borrow? I think my new motherboard defaulted to PCI video input, but all I have is PCI 2.0 x16 card (I have a geforce 8800 GT) and AGP cards. Unfortunately my motherboard only has slots for PCI and PCIe (those tiny little slots), but none for AGP.
I guess it could also be that my video card is dead, so it may be helpful to test a second PCIe 2.0 x16 video card too. Anyone have one of those lying around too?
Either my problem is a video card/video card setting, or my motherboard is DOA. Fun times!
well
Here is why I'm not convinced it's my video card that has failed:
1) In my old computer, I tried two other AGP cards and couldn't get a signal out of either of them. Technically, there is a chance that this could have been due to a BIOS setting only looking for PCIe2.0 video cards, but as you said, I agree that it is unlikely to be the case as that is poor design.
2) My new computer has no beeps at all when starting up. Ever. (And I have correctly hooked up the mb speakers.)
3) People have complained about this exact problem in the 1 star newegg reviews for the motherboard I bought.
However, as you said it is a bit fishy that I have video related problems in both motherboards. Here is why it may be a video card problem:
1) One person in a forum had my exact same problem, and despite it not looking like a video card issue, turned out to be a dead video card. She took it to a friend's house, who plugged it into one of his computers (it didn't work), and used a known good PCI video card to test in her computer (which worked). I believe he set the BIOS to PCI, and then when she took it home to try with a new/replaced PCIe2.0 video card, the motherboard didn't work again. She had to buy a PCI video card, go into the BIOS and change the setting so it would look for her PCIe2.0 card. Then everything worked fine.
2) I know the EVGA GeForce 8800 GT video cards (which is what I own) have a history of overheating and dieing.
I guess an alternative option is to give my PCIe2.0 video card to one of you guys to test out in a working computer setup. That would also answer my question as to whether or not this is a video card failure, or a problem related to the motherboard.
The take home message of this story is that I never should have gotten rid of my VooDoo3 video card. That was a PCI card, but I threw it out when I moved to Portland thinking I'd never need it again. WHAT A FOOL I WAS!
Wait... is this the video
Wait... is this the video card from your old computer that was dead? I would say it's a much higher probability that the 8800 GT is fried than your motherboard defaulting to PCI video input. I'm not even sure that many motherboards really have the option to be locked into one mode versus the other.
Either way, I don't have an extra PCI-E or PCI video card to lend you in this case. :(
The other thing is, I would check the BIOS beep codes:
http://www.pantherproducts.co.uk/Articles/Motherboard/BIOSbeep.shtml
I'm not sure what BIOS or Motherboard you have exactly... but it will usually give you a certain number of beeps to help you indicate what the issue is.