BattleAxe

I was on the phone line with the XFX customer support (which by the way excellent) and we came to the conclusion - after several tests and configurations and troubleshooting- that my Asus K8N motherboard just does not support the new 6800GS AGP card.
So please, if you have one of those boards , try not to get the 6800GS for it, because you might end up with troubles.

Here is the situation:

First, I installed the card, booted the PC. The PC wouldn't boot up, although the fans were spinning and I heard the hard drive starting up, but there was no "beep", neither no BIOS and the my monitor remained at sleep mode.

So I figured, it must have something configured wrong with my BIOS. So I turned my PC off for a few minutes then turned it on, and I managed to get the computer to boot.
Loaded windows; Installed the drivers, (by the way the newest forceware is NOT compatible with the AGP version of the 6800GS !!) from the disk and restarted the PC.
Again, the PC failed to boot up. It was hanging with no video, hard drive loads, Power LED is on, No "beep".
I say WTF, so I turn off the computer wait a few minutes, turn it on again.
Same situation with no video.
I Restart again, and somehow it boots this time. I go straight to the BIOS, and try to see if i change a few things around would make a difference. I bumped the AGP voltage up to 1.6, I decreased my AGP speed to 4X, turned off the fast-write. I also tried to change the ACPI suspend Mode and changed my APM configuration.
For info, i changed these before (a while ago) with another video card (ATI) and since it didn't make a difference, i set it back to default values.
So anyway, I exit the BIOS, reboot, still no video.
I quadruple check all cables, wires. Everything is in order.
Later I went out and bought a new power supply (Antec 500W) just to make sure that my older Antec (350W) isn't doing anything funny. Anyway, great expectations, but no luck, wasted my money again, since the computer refuses to boot with the Geforce 6800GS.
I took everything out of my PC, including my sound card and secondary hard drive, my wireless card - the whole nine yard, except the video card and my hard drive and my DVD rom connected to the motherboard.
-Still no video.
At this time i was almost convinced that the card has a problem.
So I took the card out, take it to my brother's PC (gigabyte with AMD AtlhonXP) and for a suprise, the card boots up with absolutely no problem. I restart the PC 4-5 times and it shows no trouble booting up.

Took it to my mother's PC (older Intel P4). Same. Works wonderfully, absolute no glitch, 100% functionality.
So I called XFX (the card brand) and talked to the tech-support guy, telling him all this what I did so far and asked if there is anything else I could try. He tells me that it seems like I did try all that I could and it is most likely my motherboard's fault. He asked me if I changed video cards before, and I told him that my PC had 4 cards already. ATI9800Pro, ATIX700, and ATIX1300 and all worked flawlessly and I never had such a problem like with this Nvidia card.

Anyway, to end this, I am utterly pissed off. I don't think I'll ever buy an ASUS board again. I never had such a problem before, but again, I never owned an ASUS board before. All my other boards were either Gigabyte or Microstar or Abit.
I mean, I spent 210 bucks on a card, just to breathe some last few months of life into my PC and i promised myself, this is my last AGP card and I won't buy another one, until I get a completely new setup (mb/cpu/memory) with a PCI-E graphics card.
Now i feel like I have wasted my money. The card works great, but my system doesn't work with it. I do not want to buy another AGP motherboard, just to install this card on it.
If i would buy a motherboard, It would be a PCI-E and again, it would require me to buy a PCI-E graphics card, making this 6800GS-AGP a waste of my money. I know some of you think this is funny or why don't I get one anyway, but 210 dollars is 210 dollars.
I worked hard for this money and I don't have money to spend around for a new system and I would be perfectly satisified with this card if it would work on my system. By the way, when i did have the computer boot up, the card showed absolutely no trouble running while playing a game, or doing any testing. It was running every game I have flawlessly, but again, this boot-up problem is stopping me to use it, instead i had to go back to my slow ati1300pro, which has no problem booting up whatsoever.

My system:
ASUS K8N Motherboard
AMD 64 +3000 CPU
1.5 GB of Corsair
80 GB Westen Digital
WindowsXP SP2
ATI 1300 Pro (now that's in, because the geforce card wont' work with my system)
Audigy 2
Antec 500W PSU
HP f1905 19"LCD monitor


So if any of you guys have any tips (ASUS Support doesn't and their support page sucks, it's slow and very unfriendly) or any ideas, I would greatly appriciate any help.
thanks!

fobis

Have you tried flashing your motherboard BIOS with the newest one? It may fix your problems. You can download them straight from ASUS's website.

__________________
MacBook Pro
Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard
Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz
2GB DDR2-677
ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 256MB
120GB 7200RPM SATA HDD

BattleAxe

I have tried with 4 different versions of the BIOS. Starting with the most recent and counting back 4 eariler ones. They don't change the problem.

fobis

Hmm, that sucks. Well, I really don't know then, sorry. I assume you've already tried Google...
Anyone else have any ideas?

__________________
MacBook Pro
Mac OS X 10.5.2 Leopard
Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz
2GB DDR2-677
ATi Mobility Radeon X1600 256MB
120GB 7200RPM SATA HDD

BattleAxe

googled it, and I even registered for the asus forum and see if anyone can help me, but no success. That place is more silent then the graveyard.

I have the PC running, I just struggle in the morning to turn it on, then leave it on all day. That means, sometimes 10 times of off/on button-play.
If i have to restart anytime for some reason (installing uninstalling stuff), then yeah, it's a biach.