video card / mobo not work together, very odd

Hi,

I've been frustrated by a computer problem for over a month now, and have finally found the problem, but cannot find a solution. Built the computer ground up with many high end products so in my mind it should have worked... heres what i'm working w/

GA 7N400 PRO mobo
1024 MB of DDR 3200 (Corsair XMS)
ATI Radeon 9700 AIW PRO AGP

burner cd rom... none of thats important though...

anyways the problem is when i put in my 9700... the computer will NOT boot, no power nothing.... the best i've managed to get out of it was a half turn of the fans.... take out the video card... power it on... boom everything works.... stick the 9700 in another computer... powers up... stick another video card in it.. boom it works....

i've never even heard of a problem like this... i thought it was one of two things, either the motherboard or the power supply... so i bought another power supply... still no worky (with the 9700) ... not to mention i've RMA'd a motherboard because of this

both power supplies have been verified to work... and i know the motherboard works because i now have my computer setup with a Radeon DDR VIVO that i have in my other computer...

what i've tried to fix this.... flashing the bios... installed mobo drivers.... any insight to this problem?? I've emailed gigabyte for help, i'm thinking i'll mail ATI today, but haven't got a response as of yet

Check the manual on the motherboard, it recommends setting a jumper for the voltage on your agp bus. Try the solution listed in "Example 1:" on the 1st page. This happens a lot with agp 8 cards Ive found, since the card tries to negotiate its speed with the agp bus, since your MB doesnt support AGP 2x, but the card does, I'd suspect thats part of your problemo. Let me know...

link to manual:

http://america.giga-byte.com/MotherB...n400pro2_e.pdf

i'll try this once i get home, i looked at my video cards manual and there is no mention of a jumper to switch voltages, i may try to set the bios to only look for 8X video card speed and i'll try that and see how that works, the only other thing that i saw that might affect the problem somehow is according to the manual i'm supposed to connect the power to the hard drive, and i think its hooked into a fan as well.... this may not do anything but its worth a shot!

Ah, I couldnt tell from ati's site, so your card requires a power plug just like a hard drive or cd player right? If you can, use one that isn't plugged into anything else. If you can't, I'd suggest using the one that feeds a cd rom or something else that isn't likely to be running all the time, and try to stay away from any that are plugged into cooling fans. I don't THINK that would cause a problem, but you never know.

I'd guess your MB is having an issue working with the card because of voltage, or because the MB doesn't handle agp8 correctly yet. Did you check to see if there is a beta bios fix out for your MB that is supposed to patch agp8 functionality? My ASUS did, as well as my biostar.

Best of luck, try that jumper on the MB, I'm guessing things will work a little better after that.

/em crosses fingers.

Well it looks like the video card and the motherboard aren't compatable. Judging from what I read in the gigabyte manual, there is no jumper to change the settings for the voltage. In theory it would automatically select the voltage. Anyways it only accepts 4x - 8x AGP cards. I've read on a website that there are ALOT of motherboards that have problems with the Radeon 9700 AIW PRO, and there were several Gigabyte boards listed. I'm looking into a DFI Lan Party, any objections to that board??

Never worked with that one. I've found that lots of boards are having problems with agp8 cards, not just the ati ones. Ive got an nvidia 5200 ultra at the house, Ive got 3 mbs all from different vendors (intel, asus, and biostar) and the card wont work with any of the boards, even though they all say they work with agp8 (yes, Ive tried a different video card, same result).

The same problem used to occur when agp 2 and then agp4 came out, it took a while to get it to work reliably. I'm gonna wait until next year for a new video card and see what happens.

I use a Nvidia Gforce 4 TI4200 8x. Never had any problem out of it. That was also on a ASUS M/B.

I put a Geforce 4 mx440 8x on a gigabyte board, and never had any prblems with that either.

They make a 4200 8x? Huh.

Well, maybe I need to not use a 5200 ultra, or switch to ati, but so far my experiences have all sucked.

I've been a pc hardware goon for like 10 years or so, so it's not like I'm a clueless Luser or anything.

What asus and gigabyte boards did you use? My asus is the a7n266-c with the nforce2 chipset. Of my other 2 boards, another one is an nforce2 chipset, and the other is an intel 845 I think. Are you using via or sis chipsets?

Yeah they make the TI 4200 and 4600 wiht 8x.

I have two ASUS m/b that I used teh 8x AGP on.

one was the Asus P4C800 Deluxe, and the other was P4P800 the c800 used the 845 chipset, and the p800 used the 865 chipset.

The gigabyte board was the GA-7n400-ls with the nforce 2 chipset.

:confused: Well what the hell!?! Do you do a special vodoo dance before you insert the card or something? What gives? Do you need to make a sacrifice to the dark lords of cuthulu first? Or pay homage to Thoth?

I've been giving the P4P800 the eye, I can't justify getting a whole new rig again right now though.

I really really want a p4 with hyperthreading. and the 200 mhz bus is really attractive too.

grr

In all seriousness, do you have any advice? Did you have to upgrade drivers or firmware or bios or anything? Not use the most current drivers? What version of windows are you using?

The best results Ive gotten so far is on my intel board, but get this, I can play any directx game, but when my screen saver fires up (one of the directx 3d screen savers that comes with xp) the video stops, the monitor turns itself off after 5 seconds or so of not geting video signal, and you have to hard boot the machine.

I didn't realize that there were so many motherboards that were having problems with the 8X AGP. Does anyone know of any NForce2 boards that support 8X AGP, specifically the ATI flavor of them...

In theory there are many that work, but i've ran into a particular type that doesn't. I do want a high performance board, and the GA7N400 Pro 2 had everything i wanted, including 4 DDR slots incase i wanted to upgrade later, which is a rareity, but i'm wanting most of these features.

Next board i'm looking into is a DFI Lan Party, NFII i think is whats its official title is. Got really good reviews from anandantech, as did the GA7N400 (a slightly higher horsepower version atleast) ....

they were running Radeon 9800's in the test for it, i'm not getting why a 9700 doesn't work... I've babbled on enough... my new computer has been nothing but a headache lol! I'm going to heavily research the next mobo before I take the leap this time!

After monkey'n with this for a few weeks and not having my new computer completely up to 100% I sent the motherboard, ram, processor, & video card off to a friend of mine so he could hopefully isolate the problem. He has a better area to test it with, not to mention tons of experience with gigabyte / ati combination, and even another Radeon 9700 AIW to test it with...

There was a problem with the power being supplied to this particular video card. He asked if I tested the card without power. My answer was no because video is an essential part of your computer, and this particular card needs power to work. Once powered on without the power plugged in the computer WOULD boot, but of course it would scream at you to plug in the power.

Upon testing my video card in the other machine with the other computer with the AIW, it worked. Upon testing my friends AIW with my setup it worked. So the solution was trading video cards, I'm happy, he is happy, and that makes me not feel like an idiot and couldn't fix computer problems. This is the first case i've ever heard of anything like this so its not an ID10T error if you know what i mean :)

Thanks for the help though!

Thadbme,

Many thanks for letting us know the final outcome. I was watching this with some interest, and it seems that it was a question of tolerances between the individual components?

I do recall some years ago having the same sort of thing with sound/videocard combinations in PII boxes, but that was more of a compatibility issue.

Tolerances worries me, as it suggests that kit is getting more sensitive and is not being so well made.

I would check your motherboard spec very carefully before splashing out on extra PC3200 memory. I have seen several MoBos that will not support more than 1 gig of PC3200, yet would take 2 or 3 gig of the slower stuff :mad:


Cheers, and thanks again.

Hm, I'll look into that as well. I suppose it is possible my power supply is the source of my frustration.