There really shouldn't be any difference between LCD and CRT when connected to VGA card. You should check if there is any jumper to disable on-board vga and re-enable it.

Yes there is a switch that enables/disables the onboard VGA, and it gives no video output while the switch is in "on" position.

Do you have a PC speaker connected? Does it count memory, beeps at POST or does it continuously beep or nothing at all?

I did that and no beeps at all. It's award BIOS.
Tried power up without ram, it beeps.

The BIOS boot screen, in particular, should be in a mode compatible with ANYTHING, so if it doesn't even show that, it sounds like the onboard video could be faulty

I would just write off onboard video and use a card.

Matth79 wrote:

The BIOS boot screen, in particular, should be in a mode compatible with ANYTHING, so if it doesn't even show that, it sounds like the onboard video could be faulty

Thanks. I am contacting the seller to seek for a solution.

smeezekitty wrote:

I would just write off onboard video and use a card.

I just bought it on ebay and I'll return it if it's broken.

There were problems with some old VGAs and LCDs because the signal on their outputs is not compatible with LCDs (LCDs are much more picky about it than CRTs). Find a CRT monitor in your neighborhood before you return the motherboard, it still may work.

A video card in the expansion slot is more flexible anyway.

Since there are no beeps it's not a monitor problem, it's probably bad ram. Try to disable onboard video, if you get a long beep followed by short ones it's the vga else ram is faulty.

You might also want to check which memory slots are populated. I recall quite a number of onboard chips could only use memory from the first memory bank/slot. Also, I've actually seen a broken Socket5 MoBo with onboard Trio64 that appeared to have slots to install VRAM separately, so you might want to check that up as well.

alexanrs wrote:

You might also want to check which memory slots are populated. I recall quite a number of onboard chips could only use memory from the first memory bank/slot. Also, I've actually seen a broken Socket5 MoBo with onboard Trio64 that appeared to have slots to install VRAM separately, so you might want to check that up as well.

The onboard VGA has separate sockets for RAM and it has 512K now.
There are 3 ram slots, bank 0, 1 and 2/3. Tried 0 and 2/3, didn't change anything.

dondiego wrote:

Since there are no beeps it's not a monitor problem, it's probably bad ram. Try to disable onboard video, if you get a long beep followed by short ones it's the vga else ram is faulty.

Here are the outcomes:

VGA: ON, Video: Color -- 1 Long, 3 Short
VGA: OFF, Video: Color -- 1 Long, 3 Short
VGA: ON, Video: Mono -- No beep
VGA: OFF, Video: Mono -- No beep

It's interesting that the VGA ON/OFF switch doesn't trigger the beep while setting video mode to color triggers the beep. So the VGA is bad?
The system RAM should be OK since it boots with standalone ISA card, and I have tested with different ram sticks. Are you talking about VRAM?

I didn't notice you mentioned earlier it booted with an vga card, then it's obviously a problem with the onboard video.

Maybe the VRAM chips aren't good? Have you tried reseating the chips on their sockets?

alexanrs wrote:

Maybe the VRAM chips aren't good? Have you tried reseating the chips on their sockets?

It has one 512K chip soldered on the board and an open socket. Currently I don't have any vram chip to plug in.

dondiego wrote:

I didn't notice you mentioned earlier it booted with an vga card, then it's obviously a problem with the onboard video.

Thanks. I will ask the seller for a replacement.

Update:

The seller send me another board and meanwhile I picked up a good ol'CRT from my neighbor's garage. But unfortunately the CRT can't get any signal from either of the boards. Well it's odd that both boards came with crippled VGA.