MSI Motherboard issue or dead video card?

[AgentZap]

I can't tell who is at fault here. I hope you can help.

Problem: I get no display output when I hook up my BFG 6800GT in my PCI express slot.

HW Specs:
Athlon 939 4000+ processor
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum SLI
Seasonic S12 500watt PSU
2 sticks of 512 corsair RAM
1 300 gig SATA Seagate HD

Troubleshooting:

- If I use a standard PCI (not express) 9200 series ATI video card I can post, work in windows, etc etc flawlessly.

- Made sure PCI Express was the first video seek method in bios

- Made sure I hooked up the dedicated SLI power connecter to the video card from my power supply

- Updated my bios to the one presented to me using MSI's update utility

Backround:

When I first setup the computer it would turn on and off in 1 second bursts. I pulled everything off the board except RAM and processor and started up successfully by shorting the power on pins on the motherboard with a screwdriver. After, I added back in my various components and all is well until the middle of the night last night where the system started doing it on its own (the computer was off)

Secondly, I had some issues where soft boots of the system would occasionally hang at the platinum bios splash screen and I would have to hit the reset switch to boot up.

I updated my bios this morning and the hanging went away thus far.



So does this sound like an MSI issue or a BFG video card issue? Unfortunately, I don't have access to another system with PCI express to test it out on.

Thank you

 

[AgentZap]

MSI diagnosed it as a bad motherboard.

 

[js9600]

Have they? Any sign of acknowledgement of problems would be great and give some hope. Guess you are joking?

Well, try some of the older bios, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2 or 3.3 - before you throw it out.

Not sure it will help but check bios read memory timings correctly, not allways the case. Best to set them up manually. Load optimized defaults and run thorough all bios screens. The Nvidia/ATI hidden overclock menu you get by pressing shift-f2 and alt-f3 on front page of bios. Also reveals some PCI lock setting in Adv. chipset menu. The vcard oc is disabled as default last I looked but check it anyway. Cant be sure with these MSI bios.

I had a problem with 3.4, any other HTT frequency than 5 gave me forced multiplier of 5 and 1.1v for cpu. I guess also forced cpu fsb but not sure. Whatever I used for volt, multiplier was simply ignored. Using default 5 and everything was as it should be. Strange thing, Im back to 3.3 now. I have Venice 3500, think people see different problems depending on cpu type.

Another boot tip I remember seeing somewhere is to disable USB support for keyb or something. Can delay boot process, make it look like hanging.

 

[AgentZap]

Apparently they agree the one PCI Express slot is shot because when i plug it in the secondary one its fine. Just kind of sucks because if I RMA it to newegg they charge a restocking fee and if I send it to MSI it wil take forever to get a replacement.