After extensive testing, it is clear my dear 4CoreDual-VSTA is dead. The reason is that I swapped in an HIS HD 4670 IceQ AGP card that I bought off eBay and which was not giving me any signal on the board it was intended for, my ASRock 775i65G. Both boards were fried by the card! The HIS card had arrived in apparently pristine condition, which now seems to indicate it had probably fried the seller's board on first try and was sold on eBay (Spain) instead of RMA'd. It took finding an old PCI testing card, since I was getting a black screen on boot and could not solve that in or out of the cases. The tester immediately indicated my two boards were indeed fried (tester is known to work; checked in another system). Far too late to go back and pester my ebay seller, from a purchase made in October 2014.
The other board it killed, the ASRock 775i65G, is a nice mATX board which had just gotten a memory upgrade, and was sitting in a decent HTPC case. The vid card was to add HDCP support. This was for my wife, and the upgrade was the last touch. The remnants of my gear from the dead boards are being dumped into a Gigabyte GA-G41M-Combo, which gets the E7600, 4GB DDR2 and GTX460 PCIe vid card from the 4Core, all going into the now-fateful HTPC case. Still destined for the missus' home office.
The year 2015 would mark the end of AGP for me, but I have more boards around. Just finished a rebuild of a PIII (Tualatin 1.4GHz) machine (only AGP 4x), and a monster for old Win98SE and DOS games. The board has a single ISA slot for my HPIB connector to old HP drives and systems, which is why I need this particular setup. It also hosts my combo 3.5"/5.25" diskette drive, and a Colorado Jumbo 250MB QIC tape drive, giving access to my oldest media.
I will now be taking my trusty and true Abit VP6 out of mothballs, my favorite board of all time. It will get the 7600GT AGP I was replacing with the HIS card. Dual PIII sockets, AGP 4x, 1.5GB SDRAM, and RAID for PATA disks. Properly tweaked, I used to play Oblivion on this board. (It was originally replaced by the dearly departed 4CoreDual-VSTA.) It will now be a Win7 file server and XP playground. This one will also host two DVD burners.
So modern games are on my ASRock X99 Extrem6 (Win8.1), a modern HTPC (ASRock Z97E-ITX_ac) is in the living room with BluRay support, XP games on the Abit VP6, DOS games on the PIII Tualatin, and really, really old stuff on my MS-DOS 3.2 HP150 Touchscreen computer. All interconnected. NAS for business backup, and the VP6 for all old system backups. The wife will remain on Win7 and do her own thing on the new Combo board. That's six systems and a NAS; me nuts!!
When all the hub-bub dies down, I plan to get back to my core objective of resuscitating my HP150 (1984 vintage, 8088 CPU), using some new methods (HPIB flash drive on USB, HPDrive emulator on PC, and direct ISA card connect to old drives.)
(I am not rich, don't get the wrong idea! Creating my collection has taken 30+ years of patiently mothballing old junk for rainy days.)