Hello everybody. I'm new to this forum, so hope I'm asking in the right place. I just bought a Powercolor HD4870 graphics card for my computer - I followed the installation guide: uninstalled my old graphics card driver, shut down, turned off the power, installed the new ect... when I turn on the pc the start up screen before windows loads is fine, can enter the bois and it's all good - but I can't boot windows from my hard drive for love nor money. It just keeps saying "can't find media insert boot drive”. So I turned it off checked the cables ect...all seemed good. The same thing again though. Went into the bios set the priority boot drive order to make sure that was right, still didn't work. I thought the problem was, that there wasn't enough power for the hard drives because the graphics card was using all the juice, but I’ve got a Coolmaster 700w (min for graphics card 500w) which should be more than enough. When I reinstall my old graphics card, it boots up and works fine. I updated my bois, thought that might have something to do with it, but still no luck. I'm not sure if it is the graphics card that is shorting or something and eating all the power from the PSU. I'd be really grateful for any help or advice, cheers Dom P.S My motherboard is: ASUS Extreme Maximus. Don’t think there shouldn’t be any compatibility between the graphics card and motherboard, I did a search on the net and couldn’t find any
That's an odd one. I would certainly try a different PSU though, just because you have a decent brand PSU doesn't mean it isn't a dodgy model.
Cheers for the reply - I thought it might be the PSU as well so tried another one, still the same problem. The PSU works fine with old graphics card and i tried it in another machine and is stable in that one as well. I'm stumped as to what the problem is.
Is the card in the top PCI express slot? Is the secondary power connector (molex) for the motherboard attached?
yeah it's in the top pci-e port, secondary power connector? there's no molex connector on the motherboard nor the graphics card that i can see. 2 X 6-pin pci-e power connectors are attached to the graphics card,24-pin and 8-pin CPU are connected to the mother board. As far as I'm aware everything that can be pluged in, is pluged in. Thanks again for your time
Hmm, all the dual graphics boards I've had have molex connectors on the board to assist with powering the slot, though they shouldn't be necessary for one card. Are you running a recent BIOS on your board?
I've double checked and there's knowhere else anything could be attached to the graphics card. I just updated my bois: verion 1007 (release date 20/03/2008). I get very odd power fluctuation when I install the graphics card, all the fans rev up really high then rev down for no reason - do you think it could just be a dodgy graphics card, and it's shorting or something?
That's normal, when a Radeon graphics card powers up the fan runs at high speed for a few seconds, then drops to idle speed once the self-test procedure finishes.
do think there could be any bois settings stopping it from working? I've had a look through them and pretty much everything is set to auto - could it be the pci-e port frequency settings or something like that?
I've not heard of that being a problem. PCIe bus tends to pertain to performance boosts, nothing else.
