AGP Card gone bad? Or MB AGP slot gone bad?

[jhammer569]

My computer no longer boots up properly with my ATI 8500DV all-in-wonder plugged into the AGP slot of my ASUS A7V8X mb. At first I thought it was a windows thing because the display had all rainbow colored lines in repeating patterns (changes every time) when I tried to boot into XP Pro, but then I started getting DOS gibberish during the initial boot, sometimes right after the generic memory test during bootup.

I pulled the card out of the AGP slot and I'm able to boot just using my other ATI 7500 Radeon with no problems. So I'm thinking either the card is bad or something within the mb AGP area/slot is bad.

Is there a way I can isolate the problem or test it with some utility?

Because while I build myself a new computer from scratch, I'd like to buy a cheap ATI 8500dv replacement card from ebay & plug it into the AGP slot just to keep my current machine running while I make the new one. But I don't want to buy a replacement if it's a mb problem and not a vid card problem.

I don't have any other PC's I can test the card in unfortunately.

Thnx

 

[Lorne]

If the 7500 works in all areas then I would say the 8500 is failing or possibly your supply.

 

[jhammer569]

You mean my main power supply? Or something else? And yes, 7500 works 100%, boots right into XP w/o a hitch.

 

[faxon]

what is the rest of your system hardware?. because if your cpu and ram are as old as your 8500, i wouldnt get more than a 6800GT AGP to go with that system, since you will run into a cpu bttleneck soon after except at higher resolutions. if you are retiring the rig to just browsing and older games i would get said geforce card and call it a day. and afaik the 7500 and the 8500 Radeon cards dont have an external power draw, so the PSU probably isnt an issue unless you put in a power hungry GPU to replace the dead one. only reason i wouldnt use the 7500 is that it wont accelerate most newer video playback and im not sure if it can even do DVds without a seperate hardware decoder add on card, and basic image quality in browsing would actually suffer somewhat