Last month, I was able to secure an Opty 165 before they went OOS everywhere and jumped in price. Now that I had finally obtained a processor, I could begin to assemble a new machine, some of whose parts I had been keeping in storage for nearly a year, waiting until AMD dual core was a good enough value. However, since I decided to buy the processor at the very last minute, the only ones left were OEM, where I would have preferred retail in this instance. So I had 30 days to determine if the processor even works.
Now, this was on Nov. 9. As is typical of me, I wait until several days ago to begin assembly. I don't have a few components yet, such as a PCIe video card, or a spare hard drive, but I have things that I believed should suffice for testing, such as an old Voodoo3 and a Knoppix CD.
I expected the BIOS to initialize the PCI video card after finding nothing plugged into the PCIe x16 slot. However, this does not happen. Furthermore, I can tell that no OS is loaded, neither from CD nor from floppy. According to the diagnostic lights on the back, the boot makes it past the POST, past chipset and other hardware initialization, all the way to initialization of the floppy drive controller (the final two steps are to initialize the hard drive controllers and to execute the bootloader), where the boot process then hangs; but without more detailed feedback and access to the BIOS configuration, I can't figure out what the problem is, much less fix it. So, I figure that I should get a video card Very Soon (read: now).
So, as I see it, I have two courses of action: I can get the high-middle-end card I want now, or I can get the cheapest I can find now and wait until prices come down another level on the more expensive ones, then reevaluate.
These are my parameters for selection of a card:
Now, this was on Nov. 9. As is typical of me, I wait until several days ago to begin assembly. I don't have a few components yet, such as a PCIe video card, or a spare hard drive, but I have things that I believed should suffice for testing, such as an old Voodoo3 and a Knoppix CD.
I expected the BIOS to initialize the PCI video card after finding nothing plugged into the PCIe x16 slot. However, this does not happen. Furthermore, I can tell that no OS is loaded, neither from CD nor from floppy. According to the diagnostic lights on the back, the boot makes it past the POST, past chipset and other hardware initialization, all the way to initialization of the floppy drive controller (the final two steps are to initialize the hard drive controllers and to execute the bootloader), where the boot process then hangs; but without more detailed feedback and access to the BIOS configuration, I can't figure out what the problem is, much less fix it. So, I figure that I should get a video card Very Soon (read: now).
So, as I see it, I have two courses of action: I can get the high-middle-end card I want now, or I can get the cheapest I can find now and wait until prices come down another level on the more expensive ones, then reevaluate.
These are my parameters for selection of a card:
- My OS of choice is Linux, so ATI is pretty much out of the question if I choose the former option. It's OK if I go for the latter, since all I need in that case is a text console and maybe the 2D framebuffer.
- My gaming has tailed off in recent years, but with a more recent machine (my current one is a 2GHz Williamette and a Geforce 3), who knows how much I'll want to do? FPS (old, new, and future ones) would be the most taxing application of the card.
- 1280x1024 is the current resolution of my screen, and I don't imagine going any higher than 1600x1200, unless LCD prices absolutely plummet in the next few years.
- As far as the prices go, I'd say that $300 would be acceptable for the 7800GT. I found this, and it seems close enough. Of course, I'm not sure that I'll need that much power (which is not to say that it wouldn't be nice...), and it seems that more down-to-earth models are being announced at this time for future release, so I don't quite know how to procede on this one. I mean, I can get a 6200 for ~$50 including shipping, so why commit to a major purchase that I don't think quite fits my needs when I can always resell the placeholder to recover most of that small cost?
Does your motherboard POST with a sound signal per your mobo manual? I think it's supposed to be one brief beep? If you have an ASUS and AI POST Reporter then plug in some headphones to the onboard audio jack and you can hear what the issue is. This worked for me.
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