Radeon 5770 Incompatibility Issue

[FatForester]

Hey guys, I'm wondering if any of you know anything about an issue with new Radeon 5770's in older motherboards. Last night I was helping a friend install the new Sapphire Vapor-X 5770 in his rig, and no matter what we did we couldn't get it to work. He has an older AM2 system, an ASUS M2N-Sli running a 3800+ (single core @2.4 GHz if you guys forgot, those days seem forever ago). The card was installed correctly, but the computer would not POST under any circumstances. Everything would power on, including the video card, it's LED lights and fan, but the motherboard would show zero activity (keyboard Locks weren't even working, so it was in a hang up). When his old card, a dying 7900GT, was put back in everything would work just fine.

[Background: He got the 5770 to make his computer usable again, because if he loads a game, does anything with flash, tries opening up pictures, or even updates his drivers, the 7900GT crashes with artifacts covering the monitor and Win7 x64 crashes along with it. He's building a new system regardless (AM3 - 785G, 4GB DDR3-1600, PII 720), so the 5770 will be put to good use very soon.]

After a quick googling of something like "5770 problems in older PCIe", "5770 not posting", etc., it seems to be a pretty common issue with older motherboards. The main source of the problem seems to be PCIe 1.0 compatibility, so I brought the 5770 back to my place and stuck it in my P35-based rig. It worked just fine, so I'm assuming that has to be it. This doesn't make any sense though, I thought that PCIe was specifically made to be backwards compatible with each revision and just be limited to whatever bandwidth the chipset could provide. With that said, what do you guys think?

 

[Clement]

What power supply model is he using?

Are you using a DVI to VGA adaptor? (If not, try it once, it worked for others) Also try unplugging the power to the monitor for a time before trying.

When you try to boot the computer with the new video card for the first time, wait at least two minutes to see if anything happens.

 

[FatForester]

I was just about to add that since I forgot. It's an Ultra 500-watt Xfinity X2 something PSU, but that's been ruled out since it can run my 8800GT without breaking a sweat, which is pretty close to the power draw of the 5770. It's also been running his 7900GT and 3 hard drives for years without issue, and last night with the 5770 plugged in the PSU wasn't overheating after a few minutes of letting it sit there.

Edit: After seeing the DVI to VGA thing work for people we tried it out but to no avail. We also plugged it in his HDTV through HDMI and no luck. We gave it a few minutes of idling on power up to see if it would try to POST or at least give us some beeps to help figure out what the problem is, but nothing happened.

 

[Clement]

Aside from updating the BIOS (which I don't think will help you but its worth a try), I don't see any other option for him besides a new motherboard.

I wouldn't rule out the power supply though, have a look at the hard numbers before you do. This is of course, without researching the exact numbers myself.

Hard drives do not draw much power at all, I do know that.

I am running a 350w enermax in my setup, but that was only after researching the hard numbers and even then I was pushing it by overclocking my e5200.

You may be one of the unfortunate ones, I cannot find any more information to help you. Hopefully someone else here can.

Thank you for bringing this to my attention though, it has made me firmly stick to not upgrading once again.

Good luck!

 

[FatForester]

Yea, BIOS was updated a few weeks back. I haven't had a chance to look at how many amps the card needs and what the PSU puts out on the 12v rails (it has multiple rails, so it could be an issue), but it can't hurt to find out. Thanks for trying though, if anything I wanted to let people know there's an issue and to try and figure out specifically what causes it. I hope it at least helps somebody, I would have never thought PCIe compatibility would have been an issue when I told him what card he should get.

 

[Goodman]

Yeah! this is true The ATI 5000 series have problems with older AM2 boards using PCI-e 1.0(.1)
(Usually the old NF4-5 chipset)

He should buy the 790 series motherboard that way he will get the SB750 wich is better then the SB710 of the 785g motherboard or wait for the new 890 series that should come out soon

 

[Clement]

Have you tried using different cables/DVI adaptor? Some people, oddly, report success with using a different cable.

I wonder if they just had their cable plugged not fully correctly.

This is an infuriating incompatibility.

edit: Any hardware wizzards around?

 

[Lionheart]

I had a problem like this in my old AM2 board, I tried to install a HD4350 but had the same issues as you, so I tried muckering around with it and for some reason it didnt like my ram, and it fixed the problem, the motherbaord wasnt very ATI friendly as it was a old Nforce4 SLI board, hope this helps.

 

[Clement]

I had a problem like this in my old AM2 board, I tried to install a HD4350 but had the same issues as you, so I tried muckering around with it and for some reason it didnt like my ram, and it fixed the problem, the motherbaord wasnt very ATI friendly as it was a old Nforce4 SLI board, hope this helps.

These issues seem to have come along with PCI Express. I've used my ATI cards in nforce chipset motherboards, but only AGP. And no problems.

 

[FatForester]

We tried DVI, VGA through a DVI->VGA adapter, and HDMI with the same problem. He has three of the DVI->VGA adapters, and the DVI cable is DVI-I Dual Link.

So far this has to be only PCIe 1.0 since it works fine on my P35 w/ 1.1. His nVidia 570 chipset can't be helping either, those have always been a pain to work with in my experience. This goes from AM2 to 939 to even some older LGA775 boards having problems according to different forums so the 5000 series must be quite picky in what it wants to work in.

So what would be a good low-power, passive, cheap video card he can use that shouldn't bring about any issues? A 4350 doesn't sound that bad if it ended up working for CHAOS.

A little off topic: What's the ETA for the 800 series chipsets? I about jumped on a 785G system myself for a HTPC until I found out about the sound limitations the IGP has through HDMI. Hopefully they'll get it right this next round.

Edit: Just found this after a few googles, not sure how reliable the info is but April / May seems like forever away. The new CETON multi-stream tuner cards should be out by then, so I guess it's not that bad.

 

[Clement]

You probably have gone as far as you can with trying to get the card he has to work, but I'm assuming you've checked out all the BIOS options to make sure it isn't something in there?

Have any PCI-Express options set in there that aren't compatible with the new card?

And I have to ask, newest BIOS on the board? That Mobo looks like it would need an update now and again. Like mine! Too bad ASRock doesn't do those kind of things for this old clunker anymore.

I'm researching the 1.0 vs 1.1 issue now. I'm trying to find out exactly what it is that isn't meshing together.

Have you tried having the new card as a secondary card and seeing if you can access it?

 

[Clement]

From:
http://www.pcisig.com/news_room/faqs/pcie2.0_faq/

Q5:Q5: Then PCIe 2.0 must be backward compatible with PCIe 1.1 and 1.0?
A5: Yes. The PCIe Base 2.0 specification supports both the 2.5GT/s and 5GT/s signaling technologies. A device designed to the PCIe Base 2.0 specification may support 2.5GT/s, 5GT/s or both. However, a device designed to operate specifically at 5GT/s must also support 2.5GT/s signaling. The PCIe Base specification covers chip-to-chip topologies on the system board. For I/O extensibility across PCIe connectors, the Card Electromechanical (CEM) and ExpressModule™ specifications will also need to be updated, but this work will not impact mechanical compatibility of the slots, cards or modules. Currently, the PCI-SIG is defining the PCIe CEM 2.0 specification which has been released to members for review at v0.5. There are currently no plans to adapt the PCIe Mini CEM specification for the faster bit rate as the market need has not yet materialized.

Maybe these newer cards really don't support the signaling required to run at 1.0.