Video Card Troubles

As mentioned in the last post I wrote about my new toy, I had to send my graphics card back. The original graphics card was an EVGA 8600 GT. Well, after getting a replacement card, I tried it out on my new machine, and once again, the same problems occurred (wouldn't boot, beep codes, etc). After flashing the BIOS, trying the video card in a different PCI Express slot, it still wouldn't work. :(

So, I Googled the problem, and sure enough, the combination of my specific mobo (ASUS P5Q Pro) and graphics card (EVGA 8600 GT) were incompatible for some reason. EVGA blamed ASUS for not implementing PCI Express 2.0 correctly to be backwards compatible with PCI Express 1.1. I know for a fact that this is incorrect because I used my old graphics card (EVGA 7600 GT), which is not PCI Express 2.0, just fine. I think separately the products are fine, but together something occurs that makes the incompatible.

Not being able to return my 8600, I decided to just suck it up and purchase a PCI Express 2.0 card. After some looking around, I settled on the XFX 9600 GT. I wasn't too heartbroken because 1) it forced me to get a better graphics card for my desktop and 2) it came with a free copy of Call of Duty 4. After eagerly waiting for a few days, my new purchased arrived and I slapped that puppy in. For 3 days it was awesome. Incredible rendering of CoD4 - the fan rarely ever spun up during the game, which easily gave my 7600 GT hell.

Unfortunately, the card died shortly thereafter, so I had to RMA it back to Newegg (I think it was a power short or something). Since then, I have received my new 9600 GT and everything is running smoothly. Hopefully this is the end of my new computer building troubles and the beginning of a new computing era :)

Final desktop specs are:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3.0GHz 1.3GHz FSB
ASUS P5Q Pro Intel P45 ATX Motherboard
4 GB Corsair DDR2 800 SDRAM
XFX GeForce 9600 GT
2 - 22" Acer 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor
1 - 80 GB Seagate HDD (System Drive)
2 - 500 GB Seagate HDD (RAID 1 - Data Drive)
Antec 650W Power Supply
Lite-On SATA DVD Burner w/ LightScribe
Lite-On SATA Combo Drive

I just might post pictures eventually :-D