• A Great friend to the HardForum with a great kid that he is trying to get a scholorship to continue his schooling. Please give hime a vote! Only 24 hours left! Thanks.
    If you have an VOTE FOR KEENAN!

5850 only working in second pci express slot?

I

icetray9000

n00b
Joined
Dec 21, 2009
Messages
12
Hey guys, sorry for the newbie question. I tried searching for an answer and could not find any helpful info. I have an asus a8n32-sli motherboard. I recently bought a radeon 5850 and tried installing it in the fisrt pci express slot. The system would not post and gave me a 3 beep error which means that the mobo wasnt detecting the 5850. I installed the video card in the second pci express slot, and the system booted up and I can use it. Does anyone know if I can get the card to work in the first pci-express slot and/ or why I have to use it in the 2nd slot? I upgraded from a 8800gt and had no problems running that card in the first slot? I also did a clean install of windows when upgrading to the 5850.
Thanks for any help guys
 
Try the 8800GT back in the first slot and see if it works... i had this problem with my old Abit x38 Quad GT... a 3870 would work in the top slot but a 8800GTX didn't... i never did find a solution so the 8800GTX is running in the second slot... if you don't mind it running in the second slot it doesn't matter, as long as its running at x16
 
Thanks sandyduff for the response. Is there anyway for me to find out if the card is running in x16? Thanks again
 
That motherboard (I had the same one) has 32 PCI-E lanes between the two PCI-E slots, using an Nvidia switch chip. Both slots will be running PCI-E. Doesn't matter if it is ATI or Nvidia.

GPU-Z will confirm this, as above posters mentioned. But the Catalyst Control Center can tell you also. Open it up, go to System Information, and select the Graphics Hardware screen - see the Maximum Bus Setting.
 
Thanks for the info guys. Is there anyway to get the 5850 to work in the first pci-express slot? I wanted to try to use the 8800gt as a physx card, however if i put the 8800gt in the first slot it is detected as the primary video card. In short the 8800gt is detected in either slot where as the 5850 only works in the second slot. I cant get the 5850 to work in the first slot so that I can use the 8800gt as a physx card. Any ideas or is there any reason as to why the 5850 is only working in the second slot? Is there something I can adust in the bios?
 
I'm experiencing the exact same issue, same card, same mobo. Has anyone discovered the cause or solution?

I can run the card in PCI-E 2, but it's really close to my PSU now. I'd prefer to have some circulation.
 
I am having the same exact problem with the A8N-32 SLI with a 5770. I moved it to the second slot from the first and it works. I tried switching the PCIe1-PCI-PCIe2 setting in the BIOS to the other option but that did not help. I upgraded the BIOS to the second newest one (the newest one looked to be a fix for XP SP3 and in big letters said not to update to it without taht exact issue).

I have no idea what is causing this. It seems to be a compatibility issue with the ATI 5XXX cards and either this motherboard or the nForce 4 Chipset.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top