help needed: ati AGP woes

[dorkbert]

Recent bought into the x850 XT AGP $249 AR from microcenter. Eagerly dropped it into my DELL 400SC (running XP SP2) and installed latest driver off ATI website. Surprise surprise the card doesn't work; the card showed up under "unknown device." Odd thing is, the card it replaced, GF 6600GT works, the other old cards, Radeon 8500, GF 3 all work fine...

Update : Finally got annoyed enough to just insert the WinXP CD and do a repair (which in effect is a pseudo reinstall) and don't you know it, problem "went away." After the repair, x850 XT showed up in device manager under Display Adapter instead of Unknown Device. Install the driver off ATi website and all is well.

Moral of the story - Reinstall fix a lot of problem you know about, and a lot of problem you don't know about. Sad that we have to reinstall to get a piece of hardware to work.

 

[Conky]

Did you run Driver Cleaner? It's important when you change cards.

 

[Killrose]

Run Driver Cleaner3 to clean out nVidia and old ATi drivers, then Re-install drivers. However you may have a bum card. Seems like the cards bios is not being recognised by the OS.

Usually you wont be allowed to install ATi drivers if it does not see (i.e bios chip) one of its own cards on install.

 

[Captante]

Its also possible your Dell psu isn't giving the card enough power to initialize properly... if its being recognized in the BIOS but not in the OS after Windows loads theres a real chance this is the problem, X850's need a lot more power then 6600's do. Try doing a clean driver re-install, but if it doesn't work I'd suggest seeing if the card will power up in another PC with a stronger psu if you have the option.

 

[Soubriquet]

I understand 850s have an additional power socket, it should come with an adapter for a molex 4pin.

I have not used one myself so it is just a guess, but maybe you were in such a rush you neglected to connect the power coupling ?

 

[dorkbert]

Thanks for all the suggestions. To clearify -

a. Before installing the card, I ran driver cleaner already. That said, I ran it again after the card wasn't being recognized. Still no dice.
b. The system is being powered by PC Power and Cooling 425w PS, so I don't think lack of sufficient power is the problem.
c. Bad card is unlikely, since this is the 2nd ATi x8x0 AGP card already (the first one being an x800 GTO that also exhibits the same problem) The likely hood of both card being bad from two different vendors is rather low.
d. System boots up in VGA mode, so SOMETHING is working, just that ATi driver won't load.

 

[buzzsaw13]

I had a 6800 Ultra that used to do that. Tried plugging in a different card and it worked, turns out the card was dead.