New system does not see old graphics card

I just rebuilt my system with an MSI Z87-G41 motherboard. Now the system doesn’t see my GeForce 9800 GT graphics card. I try to load the drivers and the vendor’s app to load the drivers says there is no graphics card available so it won’t load them. It doesn’t show up in Device Manager either.

When I built the previous system that used this card brand new, no special configuration was needed, it just worked.

Am I missing something, or could this card just be incompatible with the new board? After all, the card is 5 years old.

Did you plug the extra 6-pin power connectors into the card?

It seems that motherboard may have onboard video. You may need to go into the BIOS and enable your discrete video card.

Yes I did plug in the power (after I initially noticed that I forgot).

I’ll check out the BIOS. I haven’t done this for a while and this stuff gets more sophisticated all the time. This BIOS has a much more powerful configuration interface than the last one.

Have you tried downloading the video driver direct from Nvidia?

MSI Z87-G41 motherboard has one PCI Express Gen 3 and one PCI Express Gen 2 slots. Gen 3 is supposed to be backwards compatible but you might try one and the other slot.

If the discrete video card is not being detected I do not think loading drivers will help.

Usually a mobo with onboard video will default to the onboard video but I think it should still detect the discrete PCI card.

Still, go to the BIOS and see if you can disable the onboard video.

I agree. Try the other slots. Make sure the card is seated well.

The power supply could be the problem too. These days, motherboards have various “special” connectors. I think some have a special graphics connector on the MB? You got to have the right power supply with that plug.

I miss the simple days when a ATX standard power supply worked with all the MB’s. I had to exchange a PS that I bought for my last PC build. A PITA

You really have to study your MB manual and see what power leads it requires.

like this Cooler Master. It includes PCI-e

The OP’s motherboard specs. It’s like mine and requires a 24 pin ATX and a 8 pin 12v ATX power connector. That cooler master supply that I linked as an example doesn’t have the 8 pin 12 v ATX.

Thats how you can get tripped up buying a MB and PS.

It’s been about a year since my last build but IIRC, some bioses have a setting to give priority to either the onboard or drop-in graphics. I think on one Asus board I had the option to enable one, the other or both but that was for an AMD APU that has integrated CPU+GPU.

Couple of things, First, reseat the card (push in reasonably hard), and make sure you have the six-pin PCI-E power connected.
Second, go into the bios and make sure it is set to PEG as primary graphics adapter, not IGP (and make sure you plug your monitor into the graphics card and not the mobo, and it should really work right away).

Couple of misconceptions above- the power supply linked above absolutely has an 8pin 12v lead - in fact is has two of them (“CPU 4+4 Pin x 2”). Any power supply that big is designed for 2 or 3 way SLI/Crossfire of high end graphics cards though, not a general system. A corsair CX 430 watt or any similar high quality power supply in that wattage range is more than enough for a single graphics card under $200 and a modern intel processor.

Old graphics cards definitely work with new systems, and PCI-E compatibility is plenty good - I know there are people with bitcoin rigs who just notch off the end of PCI-E x1 slots and put graphics cards in there and it works fine - so putting an old PCI-E 1.0 x16 into a 3.0 x16 slot is definitely supported.

An AGP card added to a system can only replace the onboard AGP video.
(On the topic of AGP - AGP 1 is incompatible with AGP 2. )

But A PCI-E video card can work in parallel with PCI-E on board video.

AGP is old school. APUs have integrated CPUs with Radeon GPU cores.

I tried it in a different slot. Checked BIOS, already configured for PEG as primary. No change.

BTW the first time I powered on the machine, as I mentioned above I had not plugged the power into the graphics card, and it whined like a banshee. I powered down and noticed I had not plugged in the power. Is it possible that powering up the board without power to the graphics card could have caused damage? I cannot imagine what that noise was.

That kind of whine tends to be from fans spinning up, which they do when they’re told that chip temps are too high.

The one time I had this happen recently it was due to the chip reporting the wrong temp or the motherboard interpreting it incorrectly. But that was a CPU, not a GPU (graphics card). Another time though I had the fan fins on a GPU completely self destruct. Never did find out why.

So it’s possible the card was DOA. You might want to pull it out and look for any obvious scorch marks on the printed circuit board, see if the fan seems to spin freely, see if there are any obstructions in the case that might touch the fan (stray wires can move around and do this easily) etc.

If everything seems copacetic, pull out the board and verify that you can boot the machine with another card or the onboard graphics. If you can, start an RMA for the video card and try another one.

Get the pc up & running with the onboard graphics. Install windows. Make sure the motherboard, cpu, memory are fine. Use it a few days.

You can always pick up a new graphics card when you’re ready.

I’ve used prime95 as a burn in test since the late 90’s. It’s free. It calculates Mersenne Primes. What matters is it keeps all the CPU cores at 100%. Gives the memory a work out too. I always let it run a minimum of 24 hours. I prefer letting it go 48 hours to test the systems cooling.

btw, you don’t have to sign up for the Mersenne Prime search. Just install and select burn in off the menu. It’ll run until you stop it.

It’s calculating a set of known Mersenne Primes over and over again. Very good test for Over clockers to confirm that the pc is calculating correctly over a sustained period.

Most overclockers use Intel burn test or OCCT but that was a year ago and IBT isn’t freely available, you’ll have to dl from a forum or other place that may not make you feel warm and fuzzy but IBT will, with the right settings, make any cpu scream for mercy.

Didnt read the intervening posts, but if you got the message “board not detected,” it was detected. A truly non-detected graphics board will beep several times on startup and not load at all.

Sounds like a seating issue. If you rebuild sometimes you have to tweak the metal card retainer that screws down into the case. It’s a combo of the case, mobo, and mobo standoff, tolerance issue. I have had to bend that part on almost all video cards. Once, I had to remove the upper screw on it so the card was only retained by one screw.

Look along the side of where it seats into the mobo. The gold plated contacts should be either fully submerged or all at the same inserted level.

Oh so those graphics cards without multiple cores must work differently ? The internals of the graphics card isn’t important.
If the graphics card is dead it may fail to work. It can die . It can suffer damage ,eg impact on the chips , static discharge, or a problem due to the power supply… (May die if operated without that extra power cable.)