880GMA-E45 won't play with GTX-460

[HankB]

I had this setup working with the parts just sitting on a desktop (and using a jumper wire to power on. ) I had shut it down weeks ago but decided to get it all packaged in a proper case and bring it up again. It's the only GPU I can get to fold. so far. When I powered it up, it no longer recognizes the GPU.

While it was down, the CMOS battery gave up the ghost. I've replaced that and gone through numerous cycles of resetting the CMOS with the jumper, using default values and changing settings manually. The one I zero in on is "Primary Graphic's Adapter" under "Advanced BIOS Features" . This has choices of Internal, PCI or PCI-E. It defaults to PCI-E. I've tried all settings and under all, the built in chipset video remains enabled and the GTX-460 is not visible to the OS. (OS is Linux, btw.)

All of this worked before I packaged it up (and lost CMOS contents.) There are no other cards installed, just a laptop HDD attached to #1 SATA port, one processor fan and now one case fan.

Any suggestions on what else to try are very welcome. Unfortunately I do not have another system on which I can easily try the GPU. Rather than rip up my main system (which I just repackaged a couple days ago) I'd just let this system sit idle (off.) With the old AMD Phenom it's not much of a cruncher.

Thanks!

 

[WhitehawkEQ]

Disable on board video in the BIOS.

 

[trents]

OP sated he tried all the bios gpu initialization settings.

Hank, just to clarify, nothing is visible, not even the post info?

I would try flashing the bios with the same or later bios if available.

 

[HankB]

Disable on board video in the BIOS.

Thanks for the tip. Seems reasonable, even obvious. I cannot find an entry to do that in the BIOS. I also searched the manual for "disable" and "enable" thinking there might be a jumper I jostled or a BIOS setting I overlooked and found nothing related to the on board video. I did find "IOAPIC Function" which provides additional interrupts. It was already enabled. I went through the BIOS settings and disabled everything I wasn't using such as the extra SATA chip, LAN, USB-3, sound and so on. No joy. The only difference I see is a much shorter list of PCI devices in Linux.

Edit: Reply to Trent.

Hank, just to clarify, nothing is visible, not even the post info?

I would try flashing the bios with the same or later bios if available.

Yes, screen immediately goes into poser saving mode. I'm using a DVI-D output on both MoBo and GPU and if it's not hooked up to the MoBo DVI port at power up, It does not even turn on if switched there.

I'll see if I can find a copy of the BIOS and give that a try. It might initialize things differently than clearing the BIOS does. I could also try an older version of the BIOS.

Thanks both.

 

[trents]

"poser saving mode"? Oh, a typo for "power saving mode." I thought for a bit there you were taking selfies, Hank.

 

[WhitehawkEQ]

Try removing the GPU if you have not done so and reinstalling it, also look for bent pins on the PCIe slot.
Oh I did download the manual for your MB and your right no setting to disable the onboard GPU, I have a GA-880GA-UD3H and it has a BIOS setting to disable the onboard GPU.

 

[HankB]

I'm working with flashing BIOS and no success yet.

I've had the card in and out a few times and will pull it again to inspect the slot. I did examine the contacts on the card but that's not likely where the damage would occur. Derp.

"poser saving mode"? Oh, a typo for "power saving mode." I thought for a bit there you were taking selfies, Hank.

Freudian slip?

Try removing the GPU if you have not done so and reinstalling it, also look for bent pins on the PCIe slot.
Oh I did download the manual for your MB and your right no setting to disable the onboard GPU, I have a GA-880GA-UD3H and it has a BIOS setting to disable the onboard GPU.

Thanks for double checking.

Edit: Great Success (as Borat would exclaim. )

I flashed the latest BIOS. Did not seem to make a difference.

I pulled the card and took detailed pictures of the slot to verify that there were no issues with it. I could see no problem, even examining the pictures.





When I reinstalled the card, I noticed that I did not get one of the aux power connectors fully seated on the first press. I carefully pressed it fully into the socket. On the following boot the monitor connected to the motherboard DVI port remained blank. I logged into the system via ssh and was happy to see the Nvidia GPU listed as a PCI device. I swapped the cable to the GPU port, rebooted and was happy to see the BIOS splash screen come up. When the system booted the login screen did not come up, but I don't really care about that. I'll run the system headless. I unpaused FAH and it got a GPU core right away. I just checked back and I see that it is at 2.4% with an estimate of 9:55 (that's H:MM) to finish. Eventually it got a CPU core to process as well.

Thanks again for the helpful suggestions.

Edit.2: I went into the BIOS settings one more time before I moved the box to a location where it would not have monitor or keyboard. I wanted to re-enable all of the things I had disabled earlier. Two things surprised me. First, all of the things I had disabled were already enabled. Second, there was now a setting to disable on board VGA! One of two things could explain this. Perhaps this setting is hidden if no GPU/display card is detected. I really dislike that practice and I prefer that settings like this just be disabled rather than hidden. (Other BIOS settings are grayed out when not available.) Or MSI produced an updated BIOS but kept the same version number. I'm not sure why they could do that.