Fried or just incompatible?

[Hamzter]

Evenin,

I've just been replacing the motherboard on my media PC, which appears to have bitten the dust, however the computer refuses to boot when I have the PCI-E graphics card installed. Specs are:

MSI P4M900M3-L Socket 775 Motherboard
Pentium Dual Core E2180 2GHz
XFX Geforce GT220
2GB Kingston DDR2 800MHz

Pressing the power button just gets me a single revolution of the CPU fan, then nothing. The system works perfectly without the card installed, using the onboard video. I've also tried a Sapphire HD 3450 graphics card I had kicking around, the system boots but I get no video. So is the graphics card duff or is the board just not happy working with it? Don't have another system to test it in unfortunately atm, don't want to go ordering new bits though if it's just a compatibility issue.

Thanks

 

[nightmare99]

Don't quote me on this but I think the VIA chipset on that board is very picky about running PCI-E 2.0 graphics cards. I seem to rememebr some nvidia cards having specific BIOS's to run on some of the old VIA chipsets.

 

[Hamzter]

Well I'm going to replace the motherboard with another AM2 one anyway, so I can use the old CPUfan (special low volume one that came with the case), hopefully that means I won't have an issue with the card...