PCI Vista card

I purchased a video card off eBay before fully reading the details and got
sold a dud. Guy said it crashed after a few minutes on his PC and that a
mates ran it for 30-40 mins on his PC before the same happened. Thus I took
it that it could be a software issue or at worst a cooling issue so I
purchased it. The rotten thing wont even POST for me. Either it sits and
does nothing or causes my Striker mobo to beep 1 long and three short beeps
with a DET DRAM error on the LCD poster.
I wondered if it could even be a bad BIOS flash (seems there's a lot of it
about) but I need a PCI card that will boot to Vista #86 and allow me to try
re-flashing the BIOS. No more harm can be done as it's dead already.
Could someone recommend a very cheap Vista compatible card that will allow
me to do this?

Thanks

Robin

Dumbo wrote:
I purchased a video card off eBay before fully reading the details and
got sold a dud. Guy said it crashed after a few minutes on his PC and
that a mates ran it for 30-40 mins on his PC before the same happened.
Thus I took it that it could be a software issue or at worst a cooling
issue so I purchased it. The rotten thing wont even POST for me.
Either it sits and does nothing or causes my Striker mobo to beep 1 long
and three short beeps with a DET DRAM error on the LCD poster.
I wondered if it could even be a bad BIOS flash (seems there's a lot of
it about) but I need a PCI card that will boot to Vista #86 and allow me
to try re-flashing the BIOS. No more harm can be done as it's dead
already.
Could someone recommend a very cheap Vista compatible card that will
allow me to do this?

Thanks

Robin

The last time I needed to flash a card, I used an FX5200 PCI
to give a working screen. A check on the Nvidia driver page,
indicates FX5200 is supported by an older Vista driver.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_96.85_2.html

The 6200 is supported by this driver.

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_181.20_whql.html

For ATI, you've got X1300 or X1550 in PCI versions. See
release notes here. (I don't know if the direct link
to the PDF file, will work for you or not.)

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_ca...common-vista32

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206...ease_notes.pdf

There are plenty of options, and with a little research,
you can get just the degree of OS coverage you want. For
the newest cards (some which appear to have just come out in
PCI versions), expect to only get WinXP and Vista support.
The older cards, such as the ones I've listed above,
may add a couple nore OSes to that. For example, there
is a Win98SE driver for the FX5200.

Probably any modern video card could boot in Vista, as
long as Vista supports 640x480 16 color or whatever the
default video mode is. It would be, when you wanted a
larger dimension to the output, that the driver would
be a requirement.

If your main LCD screen has large dimensions and has
a DVI only input, you may want to review whether the
cards have an issue with that or not. In that regard,
I might trust the ATI cards a slight bit better, to
have good working DVI options. Since my monitor has a
VGA connector, I haven't been able to test the
DVI on my collection of (junk) cards here. With some of
the earliest DVI equipped cards, some of the DVI outputs
are non-compliant, and only work at restricted resolutions.
Cards like that might have had trouble doing 1600x1200 DVI.

Paul

Thanks Paul. Its just something to allow me to boot up and run the flash
software. My 2900XT wont boot with the 4870 in along with it so maybe I
just need a 5200 or something like that to flash the VGA BIOS.

Robin

Best solution? Goto Geeks.com and select Video Cards/Graphics and then
sort price from low to high and then sort by PCI-Express cards. That
will give you the cheapest (more importantly working) GPU card able to
work on your mobo and most likely Vista.

Also they usually tell you if it works with Vista.

To note you don't have to use Geeks.com I just think they have good
cheap products when you need 'em fast. Even Amazon.com or Newegg.com may
help.