My current machine is a rawkin Athlon 1.2ghz Tbird, 512mb of generic PC-133, ATI Radeon 8500LE, all rammed into an Abit KT7A.

A while back, I bought a Radeon 9800 Pro with the intent of using it. However, my machine would not boot no matter what with this card installed. Much to my chagrin, my friend used it without a single problem, and I sold it to him.

Now here lies my problem. I have the hunch that my mobo refuses to use a vid card capable of AGP 8x. I'd like to do better than an 8500LE. Can anyone either shoot my theory out of the sky, or help me find the best card I can use in this board? I had thought that the Radeon 9000 was the best ATI had at AGP 4x. Id like a 'Pro'-level card with 128mb of ram.

While I *can* play Doom3 on my 8500LE, I'd like to be able to without the game getting choppy everytime a Imp drops onto the screen.

It might have been a power issue, I would have tried a little harder with the 9800 Pro before selling it...

Did you connect power to the card from a dedicated line from the PSU that was not being shared?
Did the video card fan spin up even though there was nothing on the screen?
Did your motherboard make any diagnostic beeps or vocal sounds?
Did you set AGP to 4x in BIOS before installing the new card?
Did you remember to connect the VGA cable?

I tried everything other than a dedicated Power Supply. I even did the "start with the aux power not connected and connect it after the post" trick.

All fans came on (cpu, case, and gpu). There were no beeps. The monitor was getting no signal.

Try updating your BIOS, the last revision fixes an AGP compatabiity issue.
Download Abit FlashMenu, install, then select to update from file, select this KT7_A9.BIN file.

Quote: Originally Posted by TekXoID Try updating your BIOS, the last revision fixes an AGP compatabiity issue. Download Abit FlashMenu, install, then select to update from file, select this KT7_A9.BIN file.

I've tried flashing my bios before, I think I've tried most of the ones on Abit's site, including that one. They all say incompatable with my mobo. And as an interesting note, FlashMenu kills my net connection when I run it. I have to restart in order to bring it back up.