K8N Master 2 Far & Radeon 5770

Question

Chaps,
I am trying to install a Radeon 5770 in this motherboard, I cannot get the motherboard to POST with the card installed. It seems from a few threads on the AMD forums that there is a compatibility issue with nForce4 (amongst others) and Radeon 5770 which may or may not be related to PCIE v1.0 vs PCIE V2.1, and/or 1GB memory on the card vs 512MB.
I am running the 1.42 BIOS which I have updated by installing the latest (5.60 or 6.60) nVidia RAID BIOS, by removing and re-inserting the correct chunk. nVidia RAID has worked flawlessly for me now for over a year. My Silicon IMage SATA card  runs a non-raid base bios
I am using the RAID drive as the primary with WIndows 7 Professional 64bit and my system is perfectly stable. I keep it on for weeks hibernating it at night and almost only reboot after driver updates.
My previous card was a HD 4830 512MB which works fine.
Rest of system is 2x Opteron 248, Asektek Water Chill, Creative XFi Fatality, Sil3132 SATA 2 port addon card, Pioneer Blu-ray Reader, DVD writer, 2GB Kingston DDR800 registered memory, 4 x 320GB SATA drives in RAID.
PSU is a TAGAN 580-U12, a modular PSU supplying either 12V1 20A, 12V2 20A or 12V 35A.
I have tried all the PSU possibilities
1) Combined rails
2) Moving PCIe about
3) Connecting VGA 4 pin on motherboard (JPOWER_3)
4) Detaching all drives, and cards other than the graphics card.
and no it still won't boot.
I have verified benchmarks for Power showing that the total system draw for a 4830 and a 5770 system is about the same +/- 10W at idle and load, so at the least removing all the drives and cards should have added 60w to the system.
Looking around the net there was a simlar problem here and a new beta BIOS issued. Does anybody  know, can they find out what changed and whether I can do something similar.
https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?topic=133432.0
I appreciate its an old board but it still runs fine, and I don't have the money to go Quad Core/4GB at the moment.
Cheers
Rajiv

Answer 1

Well I can confirm that
a) My 5770 works
b) It has a fairly late (11/19) GPU BIOS and I can't find a later one
c) It has a windows experience index of 7.4! (cries in tea)
d) It will run fine from a 380W PSU (Seasonic S12), in fact this PSU is so old it does not have a PCIe connector (6 pin) so I had to dig out the 4 pin molex to 6 pin PCIE from the 4830 board.
so power wise
E5200, G31, 2 sticks DDR2 800, 2 SATA II 7200rpm, 2 PCI Cards (Tuners), 1 HD 5770  from 2 x 17A  Rails (Max 324W = 27A) works
2 x Opteron 248, nForce 4 Professional,  2 sticks Registered ECC DDR2 800, 1 HD 5770 from a 1 x 35A (420W) does not work
Moreover, the 380W PSU has been on for about 2 years in the HTPC, whereas my Opteron system is only on when I'm in the office so lets say 4 hours a day on a nomal 248 working days a year for 2 years. This would imply the 580 has aged less.
While I cannot truly compare apples with apples, its not the PSU at fault here, but as said in other threads there seems to be some Init problem on the motherboard.
I am also not going to say that the 5770 running at full blast will provide a stable experience off the 380W supply, merely that it boots and runs Windows 7 Aero and MCE without any stress or excessive current. I have not qualification tested the set up with a GPU stress test  and probably would not do so.
Unfortunately I cannot try inserting the nForce 4 motherboards second PCIe x16 slot as physically, my watercooling tubes exit the case where the connectors would sit to reach the external radiator, so it would mean a full drain and refill. I'd contemplate that if there was some common trend, but it seems too early yet, after all this thread appears in the first page on google already so there's not much help so far.
I am afraid I am out of things to try! I am also reluctant to upgrade just for the sake of HD 5770 my Opteron system is actually pretty decent although I would like to go to 4GB and quad core.
Cheers
Rajiv