New Graphics Card (replacing integrated)

[aldric]

disaster... help please

Ok disaster.... Connected the new graphics card and black screen with no signal to monitor.

Card seems to be working with the fan and light on.

Have removed the card and tried to connect to my monitor as usual through the integrated card and again black screen... Argh.

Tried yo reboot cmos and try again but computer turns on as does the fan but it wont boot any further.

Have just taken cmos battery out and will try again in 20 mins.

Is there anything else i can try?

If it works is there anything else i need to do to instsll the new card as im using the pci e rsther yhan the integrated card? Nightmare!

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Edit managed to get back on with the old card after rebooting cmos but only after removing and replacing ram... that took forever to sort out!

 

[aldric]

Marine-RX179,

I have no idea what happened but the good news is after I managed to get it working with the old integrated card I installed the new one again and success (has only taken 4 hours lol)

All up and running, just started up Diablo 3 and it looked to be working fine... and systemlabs said I can run guildwars 2 so maybe a good Christmas present from the kids!

 

[aldric]

That's good to hear. I'm guessing it might be some old settings left in the bios or whatever was stopping it from working, and got sorted after you removed the battery and ram.

Oh and btw I done more testing on GW2 on my E5200 dual-core at 4.25GHz with 980GTX+ system. Forget what I said about using the ingame frame rate limiter capping the frame rate at 30 (I found that frame rate ain't too bad outside of the city), and cap the frame rate at 60fps (the max your monitor can output), and just turn up the graphic settings to High and use Native Sampling (you could try using SuperSampling, but I think it kills more frame rate than its worth). If you got GPU usage free, you could considering upping the shadow and distance from High to Ultra.

See if you can overclock your Q6600 to 2.8-3.0GHz (despite the relatively low-end board). It should hopefully able to clock to 3.0GHz on stock voltage (even if your board doesn't have voltage adjustment feature). Just go into the bios and change the FSB from 266 to 333, and make sure your ram doesn't go above it's rate speed (ram speed go up as well when you change the FSB figure.)

Cheers mate, looks a bit complicated with the overclocking will look at that in a wee while after the horror show of the black screen I quite like the idea of things working smoothly for a little while!

 

[aldric]

Not been silly have you and not plugged your monitor into the graphics card's monitor output? Some people make the mistake of fitting a nice new shiny GPU and then plug the monitor cable straight back into the motherboard's onboard output..

I am generally pretty silly, but I definitely didn't do this!

I did have a small panic attack when I couldn't figure out why the monitor cable wouldn't plug into the gfx card as the fitting was too small but lifting out some of the box revealed the connector underneath and the installation CD

 

[aldric]

You should be fine for GW2 as well, my friend is running it on a C2D with a Radeon 4870 (I think), so with the new card your system's probably faster than his.

Cheers, hopefully it will be. I will probably get it after i'm bored of Diablo 3... really enjoying it just now tho.

Slight problem. Since I installed the graphics card the screen is a bit blurry when I am browsing the internet (its fine in games).

I changed the screen resolution to maximum and it fixed it and the text was crystal clear when browsing, but its now gone back to being a bit blurry.

Any ideas what I can do to sort this as its sore reading text for any length of time.

Cheers.

 

[aldric]

Umm... hard to say, maybe the screen refresh is set to higher than your monitor supports? Or maybe the video card's output port is dodgy? If it has another one try using that instead?

I have been playing around with the settings and actually increased the refresh rate and that seems to have sorted the problem out.

Cheers.