Weird issue with old Socket 754 motherboard

[Kalsolette]

Hi,
I have an issue regarding the AGP 8X slot on an MSI 6741 S.754 motherboard circa 2003. Basically it seems any card that requires and external sort of power (6pin or molex) will cause the card to have artifacts all over the screen, yet a card without external power runs just fine!
I am putting a PC together for retro gaming and other stuff that's either impossible or a complete headache to run on modern hardware. So I bought a few bits and pieces to see which would work best. So I put together a little tower with an AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 2GB DDRI RAM, and a Radeon X1950GT 512MB. It ran beautifully, even running stuff like Gears of War (2007 release, not the modern one obviously), Bioshock, and Dawn of War II etc @ 1280x1024. Sadly however, the Radeon started getting artifacts, and eventually they were so bad they took over the whole screen with entire garbage even at boot. So I thought the card was dying and ordered a cheap replacement card off eBay (GeForce 6800 GT). However, once I inserted that brand new card it too started having artifact lines down the freaking screen! Weirdly though, an old Radeon 9600XT that came with the mobo runs fine on it. Now I know it isn't an AGP clash as it even says on the motherboard itself that it is AGP 8X!
Anyway, I got an old Pentium 4 motherboard I had in storage and stuck the GeForce in that. It works fine, and after testing the Radeon X1950 again out of curiousity, so does that!

Any ideas wtf is going on? That AMD system ran stuff quite a bit better than this Pentium 4... 🙁

 

[lindsay24]

Sadly, it does sound like a motherboard issue. I was going to suggest maybe PSU, but I assume you used the same one to test with the Pentium 4.

On the flip side, socket 754 motherboards are dirt cheap. If you watch garage sales and sites like Craigslist and Kijiji for old Windows XP computers, you can probably snag one.

 

[Kalsolette]

Sadly, it does sound like a motherboard issue. I was going to suggest maybe PSU, but I assume you used the same one to test with the Pentium 4.

On the flip side, socket 754 motherboards are dirt cheap. If you watch garage sales and sites like Craigslist and Kijiji for old Windows XP computers, you can probably snag one.

No it isn't the PSU. I was beginning to wonder the same thing until I tried the Pentium 4 mobo. It's a quality PSU though. 80+ gold fully modular.
I may as well dump the 754 motherboard, sell the CPU, and grab a socket 939 motherboard (AGP 8X slot version ofc!!) with an Athlon 64 X2. That way I get a nice performance jump.

I'm also from the U.K. The Craiglist thing is very niche here.