old MB with new video card - need advice/help

[briankallen3]

hello all,

Here's the skinny:

I got an older computer (a Gateway, I know, know:) The MB is an older one but not outdated by any means. It's a Microstar VIA KT133 AMD Socket A MS-6389 board. And I recently bought a new vid card for it (a GeForce FX 5700LE 256DDR 8x/4x AGP VGA,DVI,TV-Out). I've check with Gateway several times about the compatability between the two, and they're telling me it should be good to go. And I found the specs for both on the internet, and saw for myself they are compatable. The MB has a 4x AGP slot, and it has on-board video but I disabled that and haven't been using it for awhile. Also, I swaped in a larger Power Supply just to make sure I had enough juice, but still... everytime I put the card in the slot on the MB and fire up the computer, no graphics! The computer boots-up fine, but nothing comes up on the screen. I can't even use the on-board graphics when the card is in the slot, even though I should be able to. I'm at the end of my rope as far as ideas go and could use some advice. My system meets all the requirements for the card (AMD Athlon 1.2Ghz, 384 SDRAM, Windows ME, CD-RW). Here are some references:

MB Specs: http://www.support.gateway.com/support/man...07869/07869.htm

Vid Card: http://www.xfxforce.com/product_view.php?sku=PVT36LUA

Any Help would be much appriciated.

Brian

[rupert86]

Try swapping the card with a friend since it my be faulty. Also, rest assured this card will work with your system. I myself am going to get a GF4 Ti for my KX133.

There must be some settings in the BIOS like AGP aperture size, AGP Fast Write, AGP drive control, etc. Ask XFX technical support how to set these values. Maybe they'll ask you to set the AGP aperture size to 256M/max. (That's what Matrox guys told me for my G450).

[CoffeeFiend]

Weird... And I know your motherboard might not be completely outdated yet but the KT133 chipset has issues, which combined with the wrong cards/drivers/os can be extremely bad (it was bad enough back in the 98se days with a sb live 5.1, promise fasttrack raid and capture card-even with the george breeze's latency fixes and such that I ended up giving the motherboard away because a BSOD every 5 mins at best sucked bad ).

Not only it has pci latency issues, but there are more problems with it, such as the via confirmed southbridge (VT82C686B) bugs and what not... (which again causes more issues with sb live's it seems)

This was the single most troublesome board I have ever seen in my whole life! There was a lot of throwing the ball at each other between via and creative (although creative and their sucky drivers have a lot to do in this as well imho). Since then I've mostly stayed away from VIA and such problems never occured anymore Even cheap ECS chipset based motherboards have proven being many many more times reliable... (I would MUCH rather be stuck with an old PCI video card than a KT133 chipset personally)

Did you look for bios updates? You never know...

[briankallen3]

thank you both. I'll play with the BIOS some more. I found the AGP Aptature Size setting but it didn't do anything. I'm just so frustrated, I'm just going to send the card back and hope they send me one that works if these things don't work. Thanks again

Brian