SADFACE (formerly Looking for a new video card for under £100)

[Ansob]

If you have time but no money, yes.

[CMaster]

It's a power issue. Everything works hunky-dory if I have the card inserted but no power running into it. If I insert a power cord, things won't boot.

The requirement for the card is 450W (with 600 recommended for Crossfire), I have 550W. I'm not very pleased, but now on the hunt for a not terribly expensive 650W or 700W supply.

I'm having a "there once was a lady who swallowed a fly" feeling :(

I'm not convinced that means it's a power issue. That just means that it won't start when the card should be working. Try disconnecting power from all your drives and seeing if it will start up then with the card connected. If it will then you're short of power. If not probably something else and definitely an RMA.

[DarkNoghri]

Specs? You should be perfectly fine with a 550, unless you're running a beast or something old and power-hungry. Did you uninstall the old drivers?

[Alex Bakke]

It could be any number of issues. Once again a 550W should be perfectly fine for your GPU. If the drivers on the card are causing problems, then it may not start up. I had the same issues with a wireless card.

Try uninstalling the drivers, then reinstalling - if that doesn't work, RMA.

[Kamikaze-X]

yeah, you did uninstall the drivers for the old card first, right?

[Jams O'Donnell]

I'll try running something like driver sweeper, but surely drivers wouldn't make a differenceto whether the machine makes it past POST. The conclusion I arrived at is that my mobo is incompatible with PCI-e 2.x cards, and the solution I'm eyeing up is to get a new mobo & processor (probably a nice mid-range i5, though I might just plump for a good i3 to save some £££). I'd been planning to do that at some time in the future anyway -- this just brings those plans forward a bit.

[QuantaCat]

Doesnt sound like its getting cheaper.. Thank god motherboards and CPUs dont cost so much anymore..

[Kamikaze-X]

I'll try running something like driver sweeper, but surely drivers wouldn't make a differenceto whether the machine makes it past POST. The conclusion I arrived at is that my mobo is incompatible with PCI-e 2.x cards, and the solution I'm eyeing up is to get a new mobo & processor (probably a nice mid-range i5, though I might just plump for a good i3 to save some £££). I'd been planning to do that at some time in the future anyway -- this just brings those plans forward a bit.

I'm pretty sure PCI-E 16x cards are backwards compatible mate....

[Jams O'Donnell]

Nope -- seems like that was probably the problem, or at least some kind of hardware incompatability with my motherboard.

Researching anew motherboard made it clear that it'd be most sensible to get something with a more modern socket, which meant gettign a new CPU, and the motherboard I selected wants DDR3 so I got some more RAM too, and since that put me over what I could use in Vista 32 I got myself Win 7 too. So I basically replaced everything but the case, power supply, and drives. The computer is running pretty damn sweetly now -- I ended up with a nice big boost to the Windows experience index thinger.

[AdamK117]

+1 on a 5770, runs pretty efficiently, 2x HDMI ports, DX11, sub £100 easily, maxes most games (but don't expect any top-end miracles from it)

[Bilbo1981]

Unplug everything which uses power apart from the graphics card and boot. First place to start.