Ancient athlon 64 x2 5200+

[Mike Green Spade]

Yes I know this is ancient. Yes I know you advise me to upgrade it and yes I prob will eventually do that....
However..
I have a amd 7950 just laying around and I tried to put it into it and it doesn't want to boot up with it.. I've tried installing crimson drivers before hand and that didnt work either.
Confirmed card works in other system, but this system doesn't seem to detect it, the fans turn on, however when I plug it in, the monitor doesn't detect anything, however when I plug it into the onboard from the motherboard it detects but doesnt show picture.
I pull video card out and use onboard and video is perfect again.

Is this system just too old to even use this video card? Surely this isn't possible, I mean its using windows 7 and it is AM2+ Socket.

Extra info:
I have taken out the old PSU and put in a cx600 from corsair that I've already used with this gpu before so I know this isn't a power supply issue and I know its not a gpu issue due to me already testing them both in another system.

The motherboard is a M3A76-CM and acording to asus its a am2+ compatible board that should be able to use all the higher end cpus.

I'm really just wondering if this is worth my time or not to upgrade, since from my point of view if I just buy a new cpu for it and am able to continue to use everything else here then I should have at least a semi decent gaming rig (good enough for league of legends maybe fallout 3)

 

[smorizio]

a lot of times with older mb and newer gpu sometime there can be bios issues. make sure the mb has the newest bios on it. do not use a windows updater to update a bios or you brick the mb. use dos or the mb bios updater to update the bios.

 

[imperialxgx]

Maybe your PCI-Express 3.0 x16 port is bad? I would try a different PCI port if you have one and see if it works.

 

[bicycle_repair_man]

Even if you could get it working, you'd create a huge bottleneck due to the CPU, so it isn't worth pursuing.

 

[imperialxgx]

If you haven't experienced bottle necking then there is never a better time to learn. My vote: For science!

 

[jasonkaler]

My guess would be that the motherboard bios is not compatible with the card, or your power supply is too small.
the 7950 uses PCI express 3 and those athlons were first generation pci ex.

Try find an update for your bios.

 

[Mike Green Spade]

Okay I'm going to clear up some confusions here.

I have a cx600 corsair power supply laying around that I threw in there to power the power supply so YES there is enough power since I've already used this exact same setup in another system that I pulled it out of.

I'm also 100% aware that this 5200+ will bottleneck hard.. I'm more seeing if its even possible for me to upgrade this, since I could buy a phenom II 945 off ebay for pretty cheap and thats a quad core benchmarked over 3.5k passmark. Alternatively I could go higher and put in a hexcore if I wanted to spend a hundred or more.. but I guess the issue here is more if its even worth doing these upgrades for this mobo? From what I can view, even a 3.5k cpu would be a huge upgrade from with 1.4k, but is it worth tossing the required $100 into the cpu to upgrade this system if the gpu doesn't even work? That was the whole point in trying this...

As for the pci-express port being bad, I've got a old 256mb pci express card that works perfectly fine in the slot that I took out in order to try the 7950 so I'm pretty sure the slot is fine.

The motherboard is a M3A76-CM and acording to asus its a am2+ compatible board that should be able to use all the higher end cpus.

I will look into the bios updates and check back here tomorrow.