I've got an LGA 775 Biostar TP45 motherboard which has been working happily for a year or so with a Quad Core CPU and 8GB of Corsair DDR2 RAM. I had a quite crappy 9600 GeForce card, and it was in a really noisy case, with a noisy PSU. So I bought a Fractal Define case, an XFX Black Edition 750W PSU and a Radeon 5770 GPU. I fitted the PSU and motherboard into the new case, hooked the two together and plugged in the GPU and tried to boot. I didn't connect ANY of the case cables or any sata devices. I used the motherboards on-board power switch to boot with. All of the fans spin up, but the mobo has 2 status LEDs and they constantly show "VGA error". I have tried re-seating the GPU many times, and sometimes the 2 LEDs come on showing "Normal / Success", but there is nothing displayed on the monitor at all. I tried swapping back to the old 9600 but it's now doing the same thing. I even tried dropping down to a really old non-powered Radeon GPU I had laying around, but that does the same. What should I look at first? Could the new GPU have "fried" the mobo somehow? I'm really reluctant to spend £90 buying a new 775 mobo *hoping* it'll fix it. I'd probably rather just sell off the components and buy a brand new Core i7 (or maybe Core i5?) PC!
Hmmm.... Sounds ominous I'm afraid. Have you tried resetting the BIOS? Sometimes (in my experience, anyway) major component upgrades require a 'clean start'... Are you seeing nothing at all on the display, no GPU BIOS info followed by the POST screen, etc? If you aren't, I would definitely suspect the BIOS... The instructions are in the user manual, but just in case... Unplug the power cable from the back of the system. Find the CMOS jumper pins (see manual) and short them by moving the jumper (usually from pins 1-2 to 2-3) Leave for ~10 secs to a minute (doesn't matter that much). Reinstate the original jumper position. Connect the power cable and see if you're lucky If that doesn't work, then I will have to either concede to other ideas or confirm a dead mobo Cheers, SouperAndy
Good idea, I'll try resetting the CMOS today and see how I get on. Beyond that, I've a new system saved in my cart on Scan.co.uk, so that is my back-up plan
I do have another slot, but it's marked as "Slave" and is disabled by the Crossfire jumpers on the motherboard. I could enable it, but doesn't that drop it down to 8x?
check the jumpers are correctly seated ? and yes it should split the x16 into two x8 slots, try splitting it!, you could narrow it down to the top half or bottom half of the x16 having an issue ???
It's just for testing purposes, if it boots this way the top PCI-E channel is dead and you've found your problem
Ok first up I reset the CMOS. The manual said to ensure the power lead wasn't connected, then swap the jumper, leave for 5 seconds, then put back again. I did this, but it made no difference. So then I put the mobo into crossfire mode, GPU in primary slot, still failed. Tried in slave pci-e slot and still no dice. Tried the other GPUs I had and none of them worked either. Right now I'm declaring the mobo pretty much RIP (at least beyond anything I can fix).
