Ever plugged some piece of shiny new hardware to your, still very capable, two/three year old PC just to find out they don't work together? I did too many times, so many that I eventually found how to fix most of these problems.
Meet the candidate, an AMD Athlon X2 3800+, 2GB of DDR2 800 and the Asus M2NPV-MX :
It is still a very capable machine, a dual core and enough RAM for most games. The graphics card was killing its style, as it was an aging GeForce 7600GS.
The new graphics card will be the excellent XFX Radeon HD 4830 that I've bought for myself a few months ago. The card is great but Linux drivers are terrible, almost unworkable for everyday work/leisure. I got an Nvidia card for me and since Windows drivers are fine, it's going to get a proper use in this PC.
I plugged the new and shinny Radeon and, to my dismay, it makes the PC unbootable. Boots up, gives a beep and then it just sits there. No problem, let's look at the problem in detail:
The M2NPV-MX is based on the old nForce 6150+430 which supports PCI-e 1.1 based, the HD 4830 is PCIe 2.0. But, my personal PC uses an nForce 550 motherboard and an Nvidia PCIe 2.0 card that never gave me problems and the standard is backwards compatible after all. This problem is the so called hardware incompatibility. They do happen from time to time, sometimes they aren't fixable even, but having been building computers for fun in the last 10 years, I've learned valuable things: since PCIe 2.0 is backwards compatible, one must first assume that everything is fine with the hardware and move on to the software, in this case the BIOS.
I checked ASUS' website for a BIOS update that would've fixed incompatibilities with ATI/AMD or all PCI-Express 2.o cards and I found none. The other thing I've learned over time is that usually hardware manufacturers will fix things with BIOS updates and not tell you. It's usually as cumbersome to fix the problem as it is to properly document it. Other times, since most, if not all, use a BIOS from AMI or AWARD, most of the time the manufacturer ends up updating shared parts of the BIOS that came from the said vendor and will incorporate fixes for problems they don't even dream that the hardware has. Someone probably had a problem with PCIe 2.0 cards, it got fixed for another manufacturer and upstream the code went.
The BIOS on the M2NPV-MX was from 2006, I updated with one from late 2007 and crossed fingers as I plugged the card. Bingo, it worked. It just booted fine. "Hardware" incompatibility gone.
I've ran a few tests and everything is working great. Had to get a 90ยบ SATA cable to connect the HDD and will give up two SATA ports there. The card just sits too close, but other than that everything is working fine:
The X-Fi still leaves enough clearance for the card's fan to work perfectly, despite the overall lack of space of the components. Hot air goes out of the case directly, so it doesn't pose any thermal problem in this build.
Upgrades usually come with strings attached. Checking that the BIOS isn't the issue is relatively painless since you can now flash it from the BIOS itself or even from Windows. It may save you some time and money if you end up lucky as I did this time.
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