First post, by Mondodimotori
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- Member
Ok, I gotta ask here because this situation is driving me insane.
For really no reason at all, I acquired some P4 and 754 AGP mobos (thiking about a 939 one too) for very very cheap, planning to keep them around just in case. This drove me to look for cheap late AGP cards (2004 onward) to fully utilize the faster CPUs on those boards. This also for no reason at all, since Win98 isn't ideal on those cards, and WinXP is well covered by PCIe options I alredy own.
But just... I can't seem to get a working card in my hands.
I currently went through three cards, all listed as working (one even brand new, in a sealed box):
-A 7600 GS from Gigabyte, new in a sealed box, just DOA, no video output.
-A 6600 GT from XPERTVISION, sold as working, arrived with lots of artifacts and died entirely 15 minutes later.
-Another 6600 GT from Sparkle, sold as working and thoroughly tested, also arrived DOA with no video output.
All of them got for honest prices (and not current inflated prices) and were promptly refunded.
Note that, for the two 6600GT, both the power connector and PCB/chips do heat up even when not displaying video. The 7600GS remains ded cold.
The boards I tested these cards on are:
-ASUS P5P800 SE (865PE chipset)
-Asus K8V-MX (VIA K8M800)
-Asrock 775VM800 (VIA P4M800)
-ABit AB-NF7-S2G (nForce2 Ultra 400)
All supporting AGP 8X and perfectly working with previous generation AGP cards (Tested with several Radeon 9600s, MX 440s, Ti4200s and FX5600)
I even tested different known good PSUs, since those newer AGP cards do need a molex power connector plugged.
The question is: Am I doing something wrong? Is there some caution I should apply to these late AGP cards? Is it the power connector? Or the AGP bridge chip being delicate and taking with it a good GPU and good memory? Am I the one frying good cards? Or maybe some settings on the mobo?
Or is just plain bad luck and I should just ignore late AGP cards, as they are becoming unobtanium by this point (100+€ for a 6600gt is insane), and aren't really worth it for either Win XP (get a PCIe) and Win98 (get an older AGP card).
