installed 9700 pro PC wont boot

[impudence]

I have a Soyo K7vme motherboard and am trying to install an ATI 9700 pro. When I boot up, the monitor gets no signal at all and the bios beeps 8 times signaling a video card failure. Obviously this would lead me to believe that I have a bad video card BUT when I try to boot up without plugging in the video card power supply i get a signal from the card and message telling me that I neglected to plug in the extension power cable for my radeon 9700. So now i am confused - this error message is part of the video card bios if the card is bad then I should not be getting a message from the bios!! Does anyone at all have any ideas!! Please!!!

 

[Creig]

Couple of ideas off the top of my head:

Did you reset the BIOS to default settings before trying to install the 9700 Pro?

Is your power supply big enough to handle your system with the 9700 Pro?

Did you try reseating the video card?

Try booting the system with just the memory, CPU and video card and see if anything different happens.



You might want to list everything in your system. There might be some known incompatibility between some of your components.

 

[impudence]

Did you reset the BIOS to default settings before trying to install the 9700 Pro?

Yes I did, I also tried selecting agp in bios as my video card but it didn't help


Is your power supply big enough to handle your system with the 9700 Pro?

It is a 350 watt power supply, which should be enough. There are no pci cards installed.


Did you try reseating the video card?

About 30 times


Try booting the system with just the memory, CPU and video card and see if anything different happens.

I just tried that and it made no difference



You might want to list everything in your system. There might be some known incompatibility between some of your components.

Soyo k7vme mobo
AMD athlon xp 3000
Ultra 512 mb
ATI radeon 9700 pro
Western digital 200 gb HD
Windows XP with SP2

thats all thats in there.

Any more ideas???

 

[impudence]

Come on there has to be someone out there with some ideas.

 

[Childs]

Up to date mobo bios? I noticed the last couple mobo's I had have had bios updates specifically for 9700/9800 cards. Also, maybe make sure the 9700's power cable is the only thing on its chain.

 

[impudence]

I cant find any updates for my mobo's bios so that may be a problem. I'll look around and see what I can find.

As for having it as the only thing on the chain -- it is. I have even tried booting with just the mobo cpu memeory and video card and no luck. Oddly the instructions from ATI tell you to have it on the Harddrive chain which I think it strange.

 

[impudence]

I found a new bios release from august. But no luck :| I am still completely stumped. GGRRRR any more ideas????

 

[Whizzy]

Tried the 9700 in another system !?

 

[impudence]

I have not. My other pc's are all laptops. I am trying to find someone willing to let me test it in their computer.

 

[fanboi]

I had the same problem, installed my new 9700 pro and had same symptoms you did.

Problem was fixed when I pushed the graphics card all the way in...turns out it simply wasn't physically installed properly.

 

[impudence]

Thats what I thought it might be also but it is seated all the way. I have pushed as hard as possible with no change in the situation.

But I found a pc to test it in tommorow so I'll soon find out if it is me or the card.

 

[BFG10K]

Are you running safe BIOS options and AGPx4 in your BIOS?

 

[impudence]

As far as I can tell my bios has no option to select 4x. But perhaps I am just ignorant. What would it be under?? The only agp reference I can find in my bios is to choose between pci or agp as my primary graphics adapter.

I don't think I know what the safe bios options are as opposed to the unsafe bios options. I am currently running the bios in standard config with changes only to time and date and boot order. Do you reccomend something different??

Thanks for you help

 

[Marsumane]

Try a different power supply cord for your 9700. Maybe the cord is just faulty and so its beeping because its not getting enough power, yet the card is detected to have the cord plugged into it. Is there another agp card u could try or psu u could try with this setup?

 

[impudence]

Now here is an interesting twist. I unplugged everything but the motherboard and the video card and tried a couple of power supply wires I had. When I tried a new power wire it got to the bios screen but wouldnt let me into set up. When I restarted the same thing happenend. Now its just doing the same old beeping thing again and wont get to the bios screen. I didn't change anything I didn't plug anything back in and I tried a few more power supply wires. I think this points to a bad power supply. Any ideas?

 

[Creig]

It's possible. A constant non-stop beeping (not BIOS beep codes) means that the card isn't getting any/enough power from its auxiliary connector. Your Soyo K7VME is based on the KM400 chipset, which means it has integrated video. Check your manual. Do you have to set the BIOS to AGP video instead of integrated graphics before adding the video card? Most likely it will auto-detect the card and disable the onboard video but that was just a thought that popped into my head.