PSU not up to scratch?

PSU is a 750W monstrosity so I highly doubt that's the problem. Perhaps feeding it power through the PCIe rail with a 6pin-to-Molex adapter would work better than giving it a cable really meant for an IDE drive or similar peripheral? I disconnected the NIC and PCI sound card and it boots so I'm reinstalling Windows XP, whose boot loader seems to have been fucked up by swapping the master/slave status of the HDD and CF so they're the way they're supposed to be.

Things to try..

-Motherboard Bios update.
-Clear Bios settings before installing card.
-Try the 5900 on another motherboard to make sure its not a compatibility issue.
-Leave the molex off the video card and see if it post or just beeps to rule out a power issue. I believe it might give an error without the molex.

Also check the caps on the card and replace them if possible. These cards are getting pretty old and there are some reports of almost new FX cards having leaky caps. I've seen some leaky caps on much newer cards than this.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/81180-33- … lview-geforcefx

The 5900 appears to be working now with those two cards removed and the CMOS flushed, but Windows XP now really doesn't want to install. It refused to install several times on the CF card, then finally did after deleting and recreating the MBR for the card in GPartEd, but only booted once, told me it had no paging file, and then I set up a paging file and rebooted, and thereafter it would not completely load Windows, hanging on the welcome screen in regular mode and Mup.sys in safe mod. Then I tried disconnecting the flash bracket and reinstalling to the hard drive and it keeps failing to set up the boot loader. Now I've recreated the hard drive's MBR with new partitions and i'm going to try Windows 98 and then XP (since I'm going to be using the HDD for booting, I'll need to install 98 first so the boot loader can give me both options). The BIOS reported the CPU fan speed as 0 rpm even though I could see and hear it working (and temperatures seemed slightly high--55 C--but not alarmingly so). GPartEd occasionally showed some kind of "CPU error" during the text startup sequence but it's not fatal and for all I know it could just be from the CPU lacking SSE2.

So far my retrocomputing adventures have been quite frustrating. I have a planned Pentium Pro/SCSI/Windows NT4/MS-DOS 6.22 workstation build in the future and I fear it will be even worse.

It looks like Windows 98 decided to delete the three partitions I had set up (Windows 98 boot on FAT32, Windows XP boot on NTFS, common storage on FAT32) and is reformatting the entire hard drive because fuck partition managers, Windows 9x gonna do Windows 9x. Christ I hate every version of Windows that is not 7. The IBM PC platform should have adopted Unix the moment the 386 shipped.

Well it starts to the command prompt, though I forgot to take out two of the memory modules so Windows says it has "insufficient memory to initialize Windows" because it goes over 512MB. Whatever, it boots, there's a working filesystem, now to adjust the partitions in GPartEd and after that it's XP time. I can deal with 98's bullshit later.

As for the FX 5900, only Windows XP and a 3D accelerated game can tell.

I actually managed to install 98 and XP and get most of my hardware working through a combination of, consultation with a friend, guesswork, and brute force trial and error. Unfortunately the OPL-SAx sound card doesn't work, even when I manually assign it to IRQ7 and DMA1 and reserve those addresses in the BIOS. But I guess that would be its own thread, wouldn't it? Anyway, this thread can be locked.

Some times some parts just does not want to work with other parts, it is just how the things are, at least is not happen very often...

I've requested a return from the eBay seller and whatever replacement I get will be a non-PnP ISA card. In the meantime I've ordered a Sound Blaster Live! to cover all three operating systems.