Hey everyone,
I'm hoping you can help me, I've been getting different answers in the shops I've been to and I don't know if they're right or if they're just trying to get me to buy more stuff!
My old graphics card (GeForce 8800 GT) died about two weeks ago. I bought an ATI Radeon HD 5870 off my friend, and replaced my old power supply with a much better one. After switching cases and installing everything, I connect my two old VGA monitors to the two DVI slots on the graphics card (using adapters), and power it up, but nothing comes on the screens, they both just say there's no connection.
I plugged one of the monitors into the onboard graphics (which has an old VGA connector too), still nothing. I took the power cables out of the graphics card and try booting up again. This time the motherboard makes a horrible screeching noise to tell me the graphics card isn't powered (so it recognises it, I guess), and the monitor that's connected to the onboard graphics boots up like normal, gets into windows and everything's fine, except the display is crappy because it's through the onboard graphics.
My friend says to try the HDMI slot on the graphics card instead, as that's the one he was using, so I hunt around for a way to plug my VGA monitor into a hdmi slot. One person tells me I need an adapter which I can plug into my VGA-DVI adapter which I can use with the VGA cable. Another guy tells me I need a box to convert the analog signal from the monitor into a digital signal for the DVI/HDMI slot, as the card is digital and won't work with an analog monitor. Yet another guy tells me I need to buy a new monitor, as no amount of adapters will make an analog monitor work with a digital card.
One more thing - when it was plugged into the onboard graphics I tried to go into BIOS to disable the onboard graphics, as someone told me it might be conflicting with the new card somehow, but I couldn't find the option to do that, and as the sound the motherboard was making was pretty unholy, I didn't stick around for too long.
I really hope someone can tell me it's just a tiny thing I have to tweak, as I've spent far more on this b***** thing than I wanted to already, but mainly I just want a straight answer about if my monitor can actually work. It's a Dell E1910H monitor if that's any help.
Thanks so much for any help you can give!