This guy has hit the nail on the head! I went to my local experts at CCL today and asked them about this problem. The answer they gave me is basically word for word what Cottmm says here. PCIe cards that are 2.0 or 2.1 compliant probably will not work in older 1.0 compliant only motherboards. Apparently from v.2.0 onwards the slots supply more power to the cards. This obviously means something more modern will try to draw more juice than the slot can provide and hence no boot up.
If I wasn't off-line for a large part of the week, losing my mind due to a series of my own technical woes (Palm database reconstruction) that I resolved, I would have been able to help here. When I purchased the video card for my Optiplex 755, I made damned sure that it was the correct bus, as PCIe-2+ bus architecture cards won't work in v1 slots, and sometimes, v1 cards don't work in v2 slots.
The notion that a graphics card doesn't improve MAME is nonsense in my experience. I only run classic titles, and even those suffer without D3D9 working. Why?
I use overlays, bezels and artwork; Every time MAME draws a frame without proper Direct3D support (v8 is not very workable, v9 is far better) it has to rely on an on-board GPU which is slower for a number of technical reasons. Try playing 'Asteroids Deluxe' with the overlay, backdrop or artwork and you'll see what I mean. It's very much like playing in slow-motion, which is a complete action-killer. As soon as I dumped a low-end NVidia card into the system and updated DirectX--Bang!--no problems. Every game runs at full speed with any graphics options. Vector emulation becomes far cleaner too, and I can set sprite pre-rendering to 10 with no hitches. Additionally, monitor effects, such as adding raster lines, are snappy and clean. Not that most would care, but the nag screens and game information boxes are crisp and clear (whereas with DirectDraw they tent to be blurry). The video card's GPU also helps to eliminate a great deal of memory bottlenecks in the architecture, so even if the CPU is doing more of the work that the GPU, the GPU's dedicated memory bus helps speed things along for frame drawing.
I did have to modify my card to make it fit, as the Optiplex uses low-profile cards and because those cost more, I picked up a standard card, and removed some things. The SVGA port was on a box-connector lead, so that was stunningly simply..... I was all ready to re-solder it. It's a tight squeeze, but it works flawlessly.
Now the games can handle drawing the sprites/vectors, plus the backdrop, overlay and whatnot every frame, so a dedicated graphics card is the way to go, as is DirectX/Direct3D9.I expect that if you're running a newer title (post-1996 or so), the stand-alone GPU is even more imperative; I only run a couple games after that point... Mostly adult-y 'Qix' clones ('Gals Panic' type games) though, as I despise polygon-based 3-D games.
Thus, if you haven't bought a new card, just be sure to look for one that matches the bus architecture on your system. NewEgg is always a good place for new cards, but you'd be beat off looking for a used one on eBay (bleah) or Classified Advert sites (e.g. Craigslist, etc..) or flea markets. -GG
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Topic: PC won't boot with graphics card installed (Read 7853 times)
