Why won't this card work in my machine?

[Jarnold9049]

I have an hp xw8600 workstation. 2 xeon e5410 cpus, 10 gb ram, 800 watt psu. I am trying to upgrade the graphics to run some games. It came with 2 NVidia Quadro fx 1700's. (ancient, I know.) So I went and bought and xfx r7 260x DD edition. Couldn't get it to work. 6 beeps with red lights. exchanged for another unit, same issue. Does anyone know what I need to do to get this card to work? or if not, what card can I get for the same price ($140 USD.) That WILL work in my system? And yes, the 6 pin was plugged in.

 

[alexakis99]

I have an hp xw8600 workstation. 2 xeon e5410 cpus, 10 gb ram, 800 watt psu. I am trying to upgrade the graphics to run some games. It came with 2 NVidia Quadro fx 1700's. (ancient, I know.) So I went and bought and xfx r7 260x DD edition. Couldn't get it to work. 6 beeps with red lights. exchanged for another unit, same issue. Does anyone know what I need to do to get this card to work? or if not, what card can I get for the same price ($140 USD.) That WILL work in my system? And yes, the 6 pin was plugged in.

i dont know about your motherboard and the sound it does but did you make the PCI-e first in graphics device in your bios?which i guess was on since you had the quadro's.It should have worked since it's the same interface.(PCI express)

 

[Jarnold9049]

The PCI-e is all good to go in the BIOS. I have tried every BIOS tweak That I've been able to find so far. Both PCI-e slots work fine. got both old cards installed right now. really scratching my head over this one.

 

[pacdrum_88]

From my research, the best I can gather is your MOBO is too old to work with such a new card. The 260x is of the newer GCN architecture vs something like a 270x or 280x, which are GCN 1.0 cards. Still not even sure if those would work. These cards use PCIe 3.0, where as your MOBO only supports 1.0. The RAM you have runs at 667, and I believe you have SCSI drives as well, it truly is an ancient machine. I think upgrading that PC is beyond hope unfortunately. That card is far beyond that that machine can probably handle. As a comparison, your current GPU has a Passmark score of around 450, less than Intel HD 4400, and the 260x has a score above 3,000. We're talking about 7 times more powerful. I just don't think this thing will take such a new architecture and technology compared to what it was created/designed/engineered for.

 

[Jarnold9049]

From my research, the best I can gather is your MOBO is too old to work with such a new card. The 260x is of the newer GCN architecture vs something like a 270x or 280x, which are GCN 1.0 cards. Still not even sure if those would work. These cards use PCIe 3.0, where as your MOBO only supports 1.0. The RAM you have runs at 667, and I believe you have SCSI drives as well, it truly is an ancient machine. I think upgrading that PC is beyond hope unfortunately. That card is far beyond that that machine can probably handle. As a comparison, your current GPU has a Passmark score of around 450, less than Intel HD 4400, and the 260x has a score above 3,000. We're talking about 7 times more powerful. I just don't think this thing will take such a new architecture and technology compared to what it was created/designed/engineered for.

I had read about people being able to use something like a gtx 660 in this system. Does that card use an older architecture? I was thinking about just buying one of those.

 

[pacdrum_88]

The 660 does use Kepler, which is about on par with GCN. If other people are having success, you might want to try it, but I would still be careful about putting such a powerful card in an old machine. The 660 is about 25% more powerful than the 260x.

 

[Embra]

Have you updated your Bios?

 

[Jarnold9049]

Have you updated your Bios?

I have not. Kind of scared to do that. heard it could brick my pc.

 

[Embra]

The Mobo tech/driver area of the website may have a walk thru. Depends of Brand.
I don't think you will get any new gpu to work without flashing the Bio for the mobo.