First post, by cudatox
I'm trying to turn a PC I had as a kid into a sort of do everything Win98/XP box and I'm having a hard time getting my 9600XT to work in it.
- PIII 550
- 384MB SDRAM
- Creative CT4810
- ATi 3D Rage Pro
- VIA USB 2.0 card
- USR 56k ISA modem
- 60GB SSD on SATA to IDE adaptor
- Latest official beta BIOS
The Rage pro works fine in it and games acceptably well, but I really wanted something faster. I found a 9600XT in my stash of parts that I rescued from being e-waste and gave it a try, the system booted but games would refuse to run and simply crash to the desktop. I then started noticing that the card would only display video when the computer was horizontal, so I assumed that it was a bad solder or cracked capacitor on the card. However, the card seems to work fine in another system (though, I did not actually boot into Windows).
Now, the system will refuse to POST if the card is installed. I've tried clearing the CMOS, swapping power supplies, changing the AGP speed to 2X, changing the AGP aperture size, I've reseated every connector and swapped cards numerous times. I have tried pulling all but the graphics card from the system and two BIOS versions. The rage pro works totally fine in the slot, but I cannot seem to coax the 9600XT into working. I know these early VIA chip sets were a bit flaky, but I'm really at a loss as to what might be going wrong now.
I tried plugging a POST card into a PCI lot and the system seems to stop booting with 0Bh displayed on the card, if that helps. I'm using a PCI r9200 in it for the time being and that seems to work perfectly (if a little slow).