I've had a SE440BX-2 board for a few years, and it has me puzzled due to some video problems.

Years ago, when I first got this board, I paired it with a Diamond Viper V550 (Riva TNT) and everything was working just fine until one day I turned it on and heard one long beep followed by two short beeps (video issue), however despite there being no signal from the video card I could hear the HDD as Windows was being loaded and then the Windows start sound through the speakers.

After that incident the problem would occur intermittently, so I assumed the video card was on its way out and I replaced it with a Matrox G400 which worked just fine until I decided to disassemble the PC and the board went back to its box.

Fast forward to yesterday, I got an Intel 740 AGP video card that I intend to use in a new build, and figured that motherboard would be ideal, so I installed the card, a P2-450 CPU and a 128MB PC100 SDRAM stick and it fired up right away, the video signal from the i740 was great so I decided to run some Memtest passes for a basic stability test.

After a while the Memtest screen became corrupt with strange characters, so I decided to reboot (note that Memtest was still running without errors despite the character corruption). As soon as I pressed the reset button, I got the dreaded long beep followed by two short beeps with the system still booting without video signal. One thing I noticed before rebooting was that the heatsink of the video card was extremely hot, I was unable to put my finger on it for more than a couple of seconds.

So, here are my questions/observations:

• Is it normal for the i740 chip to run REALLY hot when using the card on a DOS/Memtest environment? i.e. no 3D at all
• Could the motherboard be killing the AGP cards due to some fault? Two old cards failing wouldn't be very surprising, but it makes me suspicious as I haven't had many cards of that era fail like that (the G400 still seems to work though)
• I have used several known good PSUs from reputable brands (both old/recapped and new), voltages are all within ATX specs
• Also tested with other CPUs and memory sticks

Basically I'd like to know if there is some way to determine if this is a motherboard issue as I wouldn't like to risk frying more valuable cards. I can live with the TNT and i740 just failing, but if it's the motherboard that is causing that then it would be sad as it's a great board...