Installed new Quadro 4 980XGL and comp nearly died

[grocs]

I don`t really believe my gfx card is at fault... but it seems like too much of a coincidence to be anything else.

I just purchased a Quadro 4 980XGL (OEM) I uninstalled my old gfx drivers for my GF 4 Ti4400 and powered down. Took out my Ti and put in the shiney new Quadro and powered up... everything seemed fine. I installed the drivers that I downloaded from the Nvidia site and rebooted... but... all I got was a black screen.. HD light was on for a few seconds but went out and there was just nothing... so I power down... take out the card and put in my old and trusty Ti card and I get the usual display after powering up but my computer tells me it can`t find my HD...

Disk I/O error: Status=00002000

after trying my Win2K cd to see if my OS needs reparing it tells me this...

Failed to ArcRead the boot partition to check for signature

So I run around to my mates place who installs hardware etc for Discreet and tell him what happened. The answer he gave me was that the Master boot block must have some how disapeared and he`s not sure how to get it back on a Windows machine... so I get an old HD I just happen to have lying around with an OS installed on it and make that the primary master drive and my now master boot blockless drive the slave and I found I could access the files I required to back them up (all my project files for the last 2 years). OK that having been done I figure I need to re-install the OS to get things working how I like them so I attach my spare floppy which I need to get my RAID drivers in and turn on my computer... which promptly gushes out huge amount of smoke... having turned off the computer thinking "Oh #%$@&@!!!! I just fried my whole computer", I find the Floppy drive power thingy is fried and so is part of my floppy power cable... after chopping off the burnt bits and wrapping insulating tape aroudn the exposed ends I use a spare floppy I have and the spare power connector and everything works just fine... so I installed the OS... etc...

Well having done that... I thought I`d try the Quadro again... still black screen... so this leads me to a question... can you stick an AGP 8x card into a computer that only has a AGP 4x slot... is this where I went wrong? Did I inadvertantly screw up the card and almost my computer?

[gmask]

Well having done that... I thought I`d try the Quadro again... still black screen... so this leads me to a question... can you stick an AGP 8x card into a computer that only has a AGP 4x slot... is this where I went wrong? Did I inadvertantly screw up the card and almost my computer?

I had similiar experience installing my FX1000,, It doesn't like being in a 4x AGP machine so I'm getting an 8x motherboard.. anyway .. after I installed the board my bios forgot which drive was the boot drive and after I assigned the correct drive in the bios again it booted just fine.

[joojaa]

talk about agressive instalation!

hey just out of curiosity gamask how thst quadro 1000 is it noisy, any probs etc... I finaly got my workstation upgrade papers approved was thinking of it.

[gmask]

My rack of computer is so loud it would be hard to rate it as louder than anything else. FX1000 is pretty decent but for the prices you could probably get the 500 or one of the other current Nvidia cards and be pretty happy.

[grocs]

hrmm so I have no way of checking to see if the card is fine unless I can get my hands on a AGP 8x board... so if the card is dead (which it might not be because the monitor does come on but theres no signal) then I could send it back to the company I got it from... however if its still alive I might not get my money back... oh the dilema!!! Anyone know of a good AGP 8x Mobo for Dual Athlons? and is it easy to transfer the chips across or would that be a hassle?

[gmask]

The card is probably okay..

What chips do you currently have? I

Tyan only has one Athlon MP board with 8x AGP.. the Thunder K8W (S2885) but it only supports

[joojaa]

Well thats just it i can pretty much ask for any card and theyll get it regerdless of the cost. but id rather not want to shield my hearing at work if yy get my drift. also because it is highly likely if i like the card then a few of them will be popping up in the open office and if its noisy the results will be even more horrible in the end. Still not sure wich quaddro card is best if i average all my needs on it.

[grocs]

I currently have Dual 1900+s which will do me for a while... so I would be looking for a decent AMD MP board but on reflection I dont think I can afford it right now... which bites...

[gmask]

hrmm so I have no way of checking to see if the card is fine unless I can get my hands on a AGP 8x board...

Well mine will run in my 4x AGP system but not without problem.. like when I go to restart I get a bluescreen that says parity error. PNY tech support said it was probably becaus I was running it in a 4x system. Besides that it seems liek a waste to put a card that is capable and designed for 8x into a 4x system this however was not soemthign I had considered before I bought the card but then again I've been needing a reasont o buy a whole new system and it looks like I found it.

[grocs]

the place I got it from is leaning towards... you bought it so your stuck with it.

ugh!... All I wanted was a faster gfx card so I can animate my latest character with ease!!! My luck this week sucks... so much gone wrong in so little time rant rant

[gmask]

Sell it on ebay

There are probably other way to accelerate your character besids relying ont he graphics card.. in fact I bet that your current card is probably not the bottleneck but your rig. For example you should not be animating with the hi-rez geometry connected but instead low res-geometry.

[grocs]

I have a lwo res rig but I have a few influence weights added because of the difficult nature of getting those weights moving just right. Hrmm... ok now Im feeling dumb.. I just had a brain wave... I dont actually need the influence weights on the low res character... I can just set up rough weighting on the low res and just have the influence setup on hi-res right?

[gmask]

I can just set up rough weighting on the low res and just have the influence setup on hi-res right?

You took the words right out of my mouth..

[grocs]

Sometimes I surprise myself and actually think

Thanks for all the help

[framecount]

This may or may not help... but I know there is a design conflict with systems with 4gb+ of memory. If you're running 4gb of memory in your machine try putting it back to 3.5gb or 3gb and it should work. If you're not using 4gb of RAM then I'm not much help to you.

[grocs]

only 1 gb...

however i did find that on the underside of the board under where the GPU is attached, there is a missing resistor that i later found in the anti-static bag, this is the root of my trouble i think.

[nuabudikae]

i don't think this has been covered yet but how many watt is your PowerSupply?

I just upgraded mine and my XP box is much more stable now because of it. Part of the deal with going from 4x to 8x with AGP is the additional power the 8x units draw. Guess where that additional power comes from?

[grocs]

430W, I have tried it without the CD drives and minimal HDs and I still get a black screen so it must be down to that resistor (or what ever it is) that`s missing off the QUADRO board which has now been sent back awaiting their testing... but this is what is running on my computer normally

Dual AMD MP 1900+
Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW Mobo with built-in LAN/AUDIO/RAID and 1GB ECC RAM
GF4 Ti4400
2x 120GB 8MB cache Western Digital on RAID
2x 30GB 2MB cache Western Digital and Maxtor on IDE
DVD 16x
CD-RW 32x
USB/Firewire Card

I don`t normally have any problems but if you think I should be using a more powerful PSU what would you recommend?

[nuabudikae]

hmm, i know the dual Athlons mobos often times need the AMD recommended PowerSupplies. Head over to AMD's site or better yet your mobo makers and double check to make sure that you are running a PS in spec. Often times there are recommended lists of PS's that you ought to be running.

Truth be told this is all a bit of a long shot but worth a little web surfing for peace of mind. If you need a little more assistance with finding the skinny let me know.

Regards,

john

[grocs]

It actually has a Pentium IV lable on the side of it... but it has oodles of power cables coming out of it and I`m not using all of them so I would have thought it should be ok...

ok I got this info on my PSU... says it`s good for AMD aswell as PIV

http://www.antec-inc.com/pro_details_powerSupply.php?ProdID=20430http://www.antec-inc.com/pro\_details\_power...hp?ProdID=20430

and amd say the mobo is good aswell...

http://www2.amd.com/us-en/recmobo/DetailHandler/1http://www2.amd.com/us-en/recmobo/DetailHa...l?queryID=66378

this on the motherboard basically saying it requires 400W+ to function correctly... although it doesn`t seem to recommend a particular type of PSU.

http://tw.giga-byte.com/Server/Support/FAQ/FAQ_35.htmhttp://tw.giga-byte.com/Server/Support/FAQ/FAQ\_35.htm

so... what do you think? The gfx card with a broken off resistor (or whatever they are) seems most likely anyway to cause such a problem... maybe some kind of feed back...