No display with new graphics card

[harle]

I recently purchased the Sapphire 5850 Xtreme from Newegg. The installation was easy enough, but i am receiving no display when booting up the machine. Everything else seems to be working fine and i can hear the computer booting into windows.

System specs:
Intel E8500
GIGABYTE GA-EP45-UD3P LGA 775 Intel P45 ATX Intel Motherboard
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
Corsair Professional Series HX620W
Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
Viewsonic 20 inch monitor

I have tried to re-seat just about everything. Unplugged everything that was not crucial to booting up (CPU, graphics card, one stick of ram, one HD), but with no luck. I put my old graphics card in and everything worked perfectly. Just for the heck of it, i also uninstalled all Nvidia drivers before booting up with the new card. There is nothing else that i can think of that would cause this issue. I can see the fan on the new graphics card spinning, so it is obviously getting power. Unfortunately, i do not have another computer to test this graphics card on. I may just bring it over to a friends and see what happens.

Any help would be much appreciated.

 

[nboy22]

I would suggest taking it to a friend's place and putting it in their machine to see what happens.

I personally think that Sapphire has a problem with quality control. I have purchased all different brands, but Sapphire is the only brand that has given me problems straight out of the box. I think there's a good chance it could be a bad card.

It sounds like you've done pretty much all the trouble shooting I would recommend. Just to be safe, you've plugged in the extra 6 pin power connector(s) into the 5850 card, correct? I've made a dumb mistake by doing that once while in a rush.

 

[harle]

I would suggest taking it to a friend's place and putting it in their machine to see what happens.

I personally think that Sapphire has a problem with quality control. I have purchased all different brands, but Sapphire is the only brand that has given me problems straight out of the box. I think there's a good chance it could be a bad card.

It sounds like you've done pretty much all the trouble shooting I would recommend.

Thank you for the suggestion. Testing it on another machine will be my last hope before doing an RMA. This is the first ATI card that i have purchased, so i was not aware of of which manufacturers were the best.

Just to be safe, you've plugged in the extra 6 pin power connector(s) into the 5850 card, correct? I've made a dumb mistake by doing that once while in a rush.

Yep. I plugged the two 6 pin power connectors directly from the power supply to the graphics card.

 

[harle]

I brought the card over to to a friends to test out on his computer. It ended up working perfectly! So, it was definitely something with my setup. After running through what could be left, i was confident the issue was either the power supply or motherboard.

Well, it looks like i was wrong. Just for the heck of it, i tried changing out the DVI cable for a VGA. Used a DVI > VGA converter and plugged it into the graphics card. The system booted and i got a signal from the monitor! Such a odd issue. The DVI cable works perfectly with my old graphics card. It must be some weird interfacing issue between the new graphics card and monitor.

I had already issued an RMA with newegg. Looks like i will need to cancel that. For anyone that is curious, the 5850 xtreme is about two inches shorter than other cards, so it fits nicely in smaller cases. It is also extremely quiet. My old 9600 GSO was very loud when playing games. I actually muted the sound on BC2 for about 10 seconds to make sure the new card fan was even spinning.