OT: onboard video dead, what next?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 10:37:43PM -0400, Matt Price wrote:
> ok, what do I do now...  I have a Dell Optiplex GX1 (Don't kno much
> about the motherboard 'cept it's a funky folded-up board w/ the PCI
> slots at right angles to the rest of the board).  It seems to me to
> boot up fine, to find, for instance, the hard drive and the CD;
> ethernet connects fine (I can ping but naught else -- I think the hard
> drive has windows something-or-other installed on it); but I get no
> signal out of the onboard video (this worked fine last time I tried
> the machine out but it's been used by a not-so-careful friend for a
> while).  I actually want to set this up as a server so am not too
> particular about the video access.. but I guess I need video to
> e.g. see the BIOS screen or any other such thing.  
> 
> So what do I do next?  Anyone know the procedure?  

I imagine putting in a PCI video card should actually work.  Normally
adding an add in video card would disable the onboard automatically on
machiens of that era.  The onboard video is an ATI Rage Pro AGP, and it
probably is setup to use PCI over AGP if given multiple video cards
(most were at the time) so that you can replace the onboard with an add
in if you wanted to).

If you care, the GX1 is an intel 440BX, running usually a Pentium 2 or 3
at some range of speeds around 450MHz and such (at least the one we have
here is a P3 450).  It allows RAM up to 256MB per slot (double sided
dimms _only_) or 128M (can be single sided) of PC100 or 133 ram.
Onboard ethernet is 3c905 based.  This one is a 3c905B.

Lennart Sorensen
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