Did I ruin my motherboard? Or is something else wrong?

[mylittlepony]

So I just got a 4870 1gb to replace my 8800 gts 320 mb.

Motherboard is Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3R. Power supply is Ennermax Liberty 650W.

Pull out the 8800, put in the 4870; 4870 has two power inputs as opposed to the 8800s 1, but I had an extra cable.

All of the fans start up (CPU, case, GPU), I get the first BIOS screens (memory posts, drives recognized) followed by the long list BIO screen of other equipment, then I get a "No Signal" message and it reboots.

I tried putting my old video card back in, and I get the exact same behavior!

I noticed that I kinda broke the little white clip on the right end of the PCI-E slot. The card still goes in without the clip, but is that clip required for the card to operate?

I've tried reseating everything and making sure I didn't accidentally knock something loose trying to fit the behemoth video card in there, but everything looks fine.

Thoughts?

 

[sonnygdude]

Seeing as your old card is doing it too, that reduces the chance of it being related to the card not being fully seated.

Not to insult your intelligence, but you made sure that the power connectors you plugged in were PEG connectors, right? There's another connector of the power supply that can be confused with a PEG connector

 

[mylittlepony]

Originally posted by: sonnygdude
Seeing as your old card is doing it too, that reduces the chance of it being related to the card not being fully seated.

Not to insult your intelligence, but you made sure that the power connectors you plugged in were PEG connectors, right? There's another connector of the power supply that can be confused with a PEG connector

No insult, even intelligent people do stupid things, right?

Yes, I'm using the cables plugged into the slots labeled "PCI-E" on the power supply.

I can get into BIOS just fine, but I can't boot to safe mode. I tried resetting the BIOS to optimized and default, same result.

 

[Elstumpo]

If you had a bootable cd of memtest86 to hand I'd try that, not that I think there's anything wrong with the memory but if it ran ok it would suggest that the system components work.
Have you tried booting up from a windows XP cd?

 

[mylittlepony]

Update: it turned out the motherboard was bad.

I bought a Gigabyte EP45-DS3L and got it back up and running again. EP45 is harder to get a stable tune than the P35, but finally got it straightened out for now.

 

[FalseChristian]

Originally posted by: mylittlepony
Update: it turned out the motherboard was bad.

I bought a Gigabyte EP45-DS3L and got it back up and running again. EP45 is harder to get a stable tune than the P35, but finally got it straightened out for now.

You must have damaged the mobo when you pulled out your old card. When doing something like this always unplug the power from the back of the computer, press the power-on button 5 times to get rid af any remaining power in the mobo and touch the power supply to ground yourself.