dfi nf4 lan party oddness...

[rise]

OK, so my son's rig has the dfi nf4 sli-dr, athalon 3800+, 2 gigs ram, a wireless pci-e card and an evga 8600 (vanilla i think)

I found an evga 430m lying about so I decided to install it in his machine. No boot, 3 leds indicating a memory problem. I had used one of his sticks to troubleshoot another computer so I re-installed the ram, cleared cmos etc and got it to boot into bios. Then it froze in bios. I could only make a change or two each time and it would freeze.

So did an overnight cmos re-set and then it gets to one led, meaning a graphic problem I think. so I pull the new card and re-install the 8600 and after clearing cmos etc, I get it to boot normally.

Is there something I'm missing? Is there some incompatibility with a 430m and some older systems?

edit- maybe nearing the end for the board, found two bulging caps near the pci slots. Weird though that it runs a pcie 1.0 card fine but not a 2.0.

edit 2- well, newer card works in the other pcie x16 slot. so that's that i guess. Read about another having similar problem and he re-flowed the board which I'm not going to bother doing. Let it go until it's dead.

 

[VirtualLarry]

PCI-E 2.0 oddities with the newer card?

 

[rise]

Yeah, though it's confusing. I thought both standards, 1.0 and 2.0 used the same voltages so even if those caps had something to do with voltage regulation on those slots it shouldn't matter?

I'm not sure why the older 8600 works in the first slot and the newer 430m doesn't. Neither require an additional power connector. I've blown out the slot, which was pretty clean anyway.