I think I see the issue here from the pictures you provided: you have two broken/dislodged ceramic capacitors on the PCI-E lanes near the PCI-E connector on your card. They are right at the end at the side opposite the notch. If one of them is broken or not making contact, that can sometimes cause motherboards to not be able to detect the card and get stuck in boot-loops... which does agree with your symptoms here.

So fix those small ceramic caps and try again. They are usually 100 nF . If you don't have any spare ones, you can try the card with one of those PCI-E 1x miner risers - they are very handy for testing cards, since they only run the cards in 1x mode. Thus, if the card has issues with any of the PCI-E lanes, so long as it's not on the 1x lane, the card will boot and work.
I use such miner risers very frequently now. It also saves on wear on the PCI-E slot contacts. Might not seem like a real issue, but I've already ruined the PCI-E in one board from testing too many cards over the years.

BTW, while at it, check the other ceramic caps on the PCI-E connector of the card as well. If your multimeter cannot test capacitance, then use resistance mode (200 Ohms or 2 KOhms) and just make sure none of them show low resistance, as that would indicate a cracked/shorted ceramic cap. If you have another dead PCI-E card, you can directly use the ceramic caps from it as replacements.

momaka wrote on 2026-07-12, 11:29:

I think I see the issue here from the pictures you provided: you have two broken/dislodged ceramic capacitors on the PCI-E lanes […]
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I think I see the issue here from the pictures you provided: you have two broken/dislodged ceramic capacitors on the PCI-E lanes near the PCI-E connector on your card. They are right at the end at the side opposite the notch. If one of them is broken or not making contact, that can sometimes cause motherboards to not be able to detect the card and get stuck in boot-loops... which does agree with your symptoms here.

So fix those small ceramic caps and try again. They are usually 100 nF . If you don't have any spare ones, you can try the card with one of those PCI-E 1x miner risers - they are very handy for testing cards, since they only run the cards in 1x mode. Thus, if the card has issues with any of the PCI-E lanes, so long as it's not on the 1x lane, the card will boot and work.
I use such miner risers very frequently now. It also saves on wear on the PCI-E slot contacts. Might not seem like a real issue, but I've already ruined the PCI-E in one board from testing too many cards over the years.

BTW, while at it, check the other ceramic caps on the PCI-E connector of the card as well. If your multimeter cannot test capacitance, then use resistance mode (200 Ohms or 2 KOhms) and just make sure none of them show low resistance, as that would indicate a cracked/shorted ceramic cap. If you have another dead PCI-E card, you can directly use the ceramic caps from it as replacements.

I don't think that's it. I used the photos available on Retro Web as a reference to compare with my board, and everything looks fine. It's normal for ATIs from that era to have a trace for connecting something but have nothing there.
I used this link:

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/ati- … 0xl-256mb-gddr3

and after comparing, everything looks fine.

Those asrock g31 (and g41) boards are turds.

I replaced dozens of them back in the day when they were new with Gigabyte and MSI boards. The asrock boards were dirt cheap at the time so they were everywhere.

pete8475 wrote on 2026-07-12, 18:43:

Those asrock g31 (and g41) boards are turds.

I replaced dozens of them back in the day when they were new with Gigabyte and MSI boards. The asrock boards were dirt cheap at the time so they were everywhere.

So is there a chance the problem is some weird incompatibility with my motherboard? Because this X1800XL is really nice, and I'd really like to get it working

TInhoX5480 wrote on 2026-07-12, 18:50:

pete8475 wrote on 2026-07-12, 18:43:

Those asrock g31 (and g41) boards are turds.

I replaced dozens of them back in the day when they were new with Gigabyte and MSI boards. The asrock boards were dirt cheap at the time so they were everywhere.

So is there a chance the problem is some weird incompatibility with my motherboard? Because this X1800XL is really nice, and I'd really like to get it working

You need to test it in another motherboard if you haven't.

TInhoX5480 wrote on 2026-07-12, 18:17:

I don't think that's it. I used the photos available on Retro Web as a reference to compare with my board, and everything looks fine.

Granted the photos you provided are a bit blurry... but if they are indeed your own photos (those in post #1), then it looks very much like those two caps I pointed to with the red arrows are dislodged. Post a close-up picture, if possible. And better yet, verify them with a multimeter as I mentioned in my previous post. If you can check their capacitance, that would be best.

I've gotten many cards like this for cheap as "broken" on Ebay before, and got them all fixed.