New PC, old card

[Numbermind]

Hello.

I recently bought a bunch of upgrades for my PC... actually, I pretty much bought a new PC. I had enough left over of my old PC that I plan on putting Windows Server2000 on it and making it a mule. Sadly, I can't even get that far.

See, the previous motherboard is less than 2 years old. Unfortunately, there's no onboard video-- so I had to go digging for a video card. What I found was an S3 Trio64 PCI card. I inserted it, turned it on, and nothing happened. The PC is "on", the fan powers up, but there's no beep or harddrive access. No way to get into the BIOS.

Obviously this relatively-new motherboard has issues with PCI video cards, presumably because the last card I had in there was AGP. I'm trying to find the motherboard brand or the BIOS version, but no luck yet. I'm going to try the following:

- Reset the BIOS
- Try different slots
- Try to rule out the possibility of the card being fried

If there's something else I'm missing that I should try (including admitting that I'm S.O.L.), let me know.

 

[felixc]

- Disconnect all I/O connections, including the drives.
- Remove the battery. Sometimes the clear CMOS jumper does not do the job right.
- have the internal PC speaker connected. If it is alive, you will find out from the beeps.
- if the keyboard lights on and then off, it can also mean that your mobo is alive.
- then reinstall the components one at a time. Start with a video card. If the video card isn't seen by the mobo, there should be beeps.
- have you tried the Trio on another machine, it may be dead, too.

 

[Numbermind]

Thanks for replying; I reset the BIOS. Tried it on another machine-- I concluded that it's dead.

I went to my dad's house and found a Voodoo3. It's PCI too, but it works just fine. Now if I can only get this crummy monitor to push enough pixels...

Thanks again.