Fellcat wrote on 2025-08-25, 03:48:
dionb wrote on 2025-08-24, 10:01:
Could you link to the thread with 'gibberish'?
Main question now is if you do get video output using a different (PCI or ISA) card. If not, how have you determined that the board is actually booting and not failing to POST?
I've had my friend test my cards to confirm that they work. I'll be using a different card tomorrow to confirm that my AGP slot works.
OK, the cards work, but do you know the motherboard itself works?
Reason I'm asking is that symptom of a dead motherboard is also no output to the screen.
And I'm not too familiar with this site, so I'll just reply after this with a direct link to the thread.
This one> Gigabyte GA-6BA motherboard not good for voodoo3
Hmm, not good news. At least, not for a beginner who can't make head or tail of it. Basically there's a pretty bad design error in rev 2.9 of this board - which was likely also present in older versions like the one you have.
But... reading what it is, it looks like it would only be an issue if you are using an ATX power supply. Do you know whether you're using an ATX power supply (connected to the motherboard using a single big 20 pin (2 rows of 10) connector) or an AT power supply (connected by the motherboard by two 6 pin connectors next to each other?
There are a couple of differences between the two. The relevant one here is that the AT supply only supplies 5V and 12V, whereas the ATX power supply alos supplies 3.3V. The AGP slot needs 3.3V. To deliver that when using an AT power supply, the board has a built-in voltage regulator attached to the 5V line on the AT power supply. Nothing wrong with that - but according to the topic, the 5V line from AT and ATX are connected so that it's also active when being by ATX. That results in 3.3V being powered by both the 3.3V from the ATX supply and the 3.3V from the regulator, which is a bad thing (full explanation is complicated electronics stuff), as the consequence is that the voltage regulator on the motherboard gets overheated and insufficient current gets delivered to the AGP slot.
So, *if* your motherboard is otherwise working and *if* the design error on v2.9 is also present on 2.4 and *if* you are using an ATX power supply to power it, you're stuck with something that would require some major surgery (de-soldering the voltage regulator) to fix.
However the TNT2 Vanta is a pretty low-power chip (half the memory bus width and clocked a lot lower than the regular TNT2, which is why it doesn't need a heatsink let alone a fan), so I'm not convinced all these 'if's are true and you're actually hitting this issue and it's not just a dead motherboard. If the motherboard is good with a PCI video card though, that would be the simplest solution, as a PCI TNT2-M64 or GeForce2MX would outperform this Vanta and not need 3.3V.
