Question Trouble with modern video cards in xps420

[Xps420Blazin]

Recently while playing a game I got some artifacting on my screen and then the screen went all brown. I have assumed my old video card died, it was a Power Color Hd7770. That card won’t boot to windows anymore but my PC seems fine with another card in it.

My plan was to buy a decent enough card that I could put it in my next build but get a bit more life from this machine first. I’m looking for a replacement and finding that many modern cards won’t work with a machine this old because of various factors like needing power straight from the PCIe slot (my motherboard can’t do this). Also finding out modern AMD cards are not recognized by my BIOS.

I am not looking to get past 1080p and I eventually settled on a used EVGA Gtx780 FTW. This card is recognized in my PC and the drivers seemed to install fine but I can’t get past the windows start up screen. There is some artifacting in the initial windows loading screen like small white squares in the text (it looks as if the card isn’t getting enough power). When I get to the actual windows startup screen after about 10 seconds I get a quick glitch of colored squares in a line running across the center of the screen, then everything freezes and never moves past that even after letting it go on that screen for 30 minutes.

I have already run driver uninstaller while in safe mode on both the AMD and Nvidia drivers and tried installing again. I’ve unplugged everything external and internal that didn’t need to be plugged in. I have also reslotted the GPU and the RAM.

The card has both 8 pin and 6 Pin power inputs and I have them both coming from a single daisy chained cable that is run to my 8 pin pcie port on my modular psu. It should be providing enough power but I’m not sure I did this correctly. I also tried running the 8 pin CPU output from my GPU to the 6 pin on the card and that didn’t help, I got the same artifacting and no boot. The card is recognized in windows but I have heard that maybe my PC isn’t seeing the card in BIOS although I couldn’t figure out how to check that.

I suspect that it’s a power source issue or I just have a dead card but I’m running out of road here any help from y’all would be much appreciated.

My specs:
Dell XPS420
Windows 7 Professional
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 3.0 GHz
EVGA Gtx780 FTW
Corsair 8gb DDR2
Corsair CS650M

 

[Xps420Blazin]

Correction: I tried running the 8 pin CPU output on my GPU to my 6 pin input on the GPU. Anyway that didn’t work.

 

[punkncat]

One thing to note about the XPS line is that a good portion of them were BIOS locked to a specific group of video cards. As painful as it will be, you may have to try and locate one of the (hopefully various) options that the machine could have been configured with, new.

I cannot recall the model, but had the XPS with the i7 2700 and this was the specific issue that retired it from gaming use.

 

[Xps420Blazin]

Update: After another bios reset by removing the battery I am just getting blue screen and then reset at windows startup.

 

[Xps420Blazin]

One thing to note about the XPS line is that a good portion of them were BIOS locked to a specific group of video cards. As painful as it will be, you may have to try and locate one of the (hopefully various) options that the machine could have been configured with, new.

I cannot recall the model, but had the XPS with the i7 2700 and this was the specific issue that retired it from gaming use.

Interesting, is there any way to find out which bios I have and which card might be compatible? I was specifically trying to figure that out and making no progress. I had read in another forum of a user who had this card in an xps420 but if they don’t all have the same bios that really complicates things. Thank you for your reply.

 

[punkncat]

Your service code might be of some help. Dell doesn't particularly make things easy to find in their universe without it. Probably going to have to haunt some old posts in the Dell forums and see if someone else has the same issue.

You mention another user having the same system operating on the same card? Did that individual have to change power supply?

 

[Xps420Blazin]

Ok I’m going to look for the service code. I’m not sure if that person had an after market PSU but I do it’s a Cs650m and it’s approved for this card although I’m not sure if I’m plugging it in correctly I literally read like 6 conflicting descriptions of how to do it. I have my 8 pin pcie out from the psu on a daisy chain plugged into both the 8 and 6 pin output of the card. I pretty sure no other ports on my psu are 12v.