Mobo/CPU/RAM or GFX error? Possible PSU? Nightmare Continues

[danielfoley]

Some of you answered to my post yesterday about the constant problems that I was having with my PC, I am running an MSI RD480 Neo2 Socket 939 mobo, I am running a dual core AMD 3800+ AM2 running at 2.01ghz, 3 gigabytes of DDR ram, 2 Gigabytes of PC3200 and 1 Gigabyte of 2700. I have 4 IDE hard drives, 1 SATA hard drive, 1 DVD Rom and a DVD Rw, both of which run of the PCI Raid Card (Aralion). I am running a new PNY Geforce Graphics card, it’s a PCI-IE graphics card with 512mb DDR2 ram, its brand new and has 2x DVI outputs.

The problem im having is now that after rebuilding the PC, I have 3 main issues, the first is,
I have 3gb installed on my machine, yet it memtests only to 2.5gb, I have taken out and swapped sticks, and the amount doesn’t change, i.e. if I swap sticks around it still says 2.5gb even though there is 3gb, I highly doubt the ram is faulty, could it be a faulty DIMM channel?

The second issue is that I have a dual display setup that used to run both monitors from DVI, I had a DVI to VGA adapter on both slots running to the screens. The problem im getting is when I turn the pc on, the left side monitor comes on but the right hand one just says “No Signal”, for a brief second when I press the power button the screen flickers for a split millisecond then just goes to no signal. Yet, If I unplug it from the graphics card when windows has loaded, and I plug it in the monitor springs to life and the other monitor stops working, even if I set it to use both monitors in Windows and in VGA mode, no matter what I do, only monitor will power on., I know both monitors are ok with no faults as I tested it with another machine and they both came on.

The Graphics card Is on my main board in the X16 Master PCI-Ie slot, in the slave slot is the MSI Dual Graphics Switch card which is for a slot filler when there is no Slave PCI ie graphics card, The graphics card does not require an independent power source, instead, a power connector plugs into the board to run the Crossfire Chip on the southbridge, the ATI Crossfire runs 2 graphics card both together, I am using the master slot.

The graphics card is a PNY GeForce 9400 GT / 512MB DDR2 / HDTV-OUT DVI / PCI-E Graphics Card, is this incompatible with the Crossfire PCIie?

The third issue is that I cannot get windows to show my SATA harddrive, I go to reinstall windows and it does not give me the option to install to the sata drive, I am also using IDE hard drives, would that stop windows from finding the sata drive before the installation of XP?

The ULI raid controller shows the drive as existent, and it exists in the bios, just nowhere else?

Any help would be great

Cheers

 

[evongugg]

First issue: test the memory with memtest86+
Tell us what the sticks are and their capacity also.

Third issue: set the boot order in the bios this way: CD-Rom first, SATA second.

 

[jitpublisher]

More help on the third issue....
Installing XP on an SATA drive means you have to either:
1. Set the SATA controller to "native" or "emulated" IDE mode, or
2. When promted at the start of the installation hit F6 to install a third party device driver. Then when promted again, insert the disk with the SATA drivers into your machine.

XP does not contain native support for SATA drives, you have to do one of these things in order for it to see your SATA drive.

 

[danielfoley]

Great ill give that a shot! thanks, if i can sort the GFX too that will be sweet!

 

[evongugg]

Disconnect the IDE drives when installing Windows.
Disable the RAID controller in the bios.

 

[xnem3s1sx]

Try the 2gb of pc 3200 alone, if they are working correctly, you will get more performance out of having 2 channels to each of them then having 3gb.
The graphics card may be bad, try it in another computer, and I think jitpublisher has the answer for your hdd problem

 

[danielfoley]

thanks guys for all your help, I have solved most of the problems, the graphics card will not work in any configuration, so i replaced it with my old ATI Radeon X600 and it now works, although Im stuck with the PNY GeForce graphics card which is brand new, i want to use it but cant!