The Quern

Well, I now have a functional system, complete with monster video card.  I officially dub it Super Rhino, after one of Thomas’ all-time favorite movie characters.  So I’m done configuring the system, and that’s great.

How I got there was a bit crazy.

First off, I was wrong before.  I did not have any IDE-style (Molex) connectors free in the case.  I had only SATA and the one PCIe.  I went to MicroCenter to look for SATA to PCIe or SATA to Molex adapters, and had no luck.  Plenty of Molex to SATA, but not the other way around.

However, Newegg came to the rescue.  They had SATA to Molex adapters, but after I did a bit of reading I found out that the wattage specs for SATA are about 25 W lower than the PCIe specs.  Dangerous.  Luckily, Newegg also had a “Molex x2 to PCIe” converter, so I got two of the SATA to Molex adapters and chained them into the double Molex to PCIe adapter, and presto!  A case full of wires, but also a video card with two power connections, neither of which was loaded over spec.

So that worked great, and it booted up fine connected to my LCD monitor.  But what I really wanted to do was see how it performed on the HDTV with the HDMI adapter.  With that in mind, I carted it downstairs and plugged it in.

Nothing.

The screen stayed black, with a small “0033″ down in the lower-right corner.  This was an obvious problem.

So I carted the LCD downstairs and plugged it in, VGA-style.  It came up fine, so there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the card or the driver installation.  I tried HDMI again.  Nothing.  I tried both together.  Aha!  It came up fine, detecting the HDMI as well and cloning the display from the LCD onto the HDTV.  Progress!

I jimmied some of the settings around to try to get it to recognize the HDMI interface on boot, and restarted to test it.

Oops.  Nothing.  Tried both at once.  Nothing.  Tried the LCD alone.  Nothing for a long time, then the gray-screen Vista purgatory that told me that it couldn’t start up the computer.  Then 15 minutes in auto-repair before it threw up its digital hands and gave up.  So I rebooted in Safe Mode.

That worked; I was able to log in and look around.  I tried uninstalling the ATI driver package, but it gave me an error that referred to not being able to find the driver, so I figured Safe Mode probably didn’t load it.  So I tried to reboot in low-res graphics mode, figuring I might have set the driver to a bad resolution or something.

Back to Vista Purgatory.

OK, that wasn’t it.  Try “Last Known Good Configuration”.  Bingo!  Now that I was in, I could get in and modify the offending settings in the video drivers.  Reboot.  We’re back!  At least basic VGA and DVI was working.  Now to fix the HDMI…

I found an indication online that it might be a BIOS issue.  As the last few BIOS updates were to fix issues with the newest Intel chips, and I have the newest generation of chip, I didn’t feel comfortable flashing to an older version.  What I did find out was that people have had pretty good success letting their computer boot monitor-free until Vista loads, then connecting the HDMI.  If I was trying to use this as a media center PC that would suck, but as I will only occasionally be carting the mini-tower downstairs to try out some game on the big screen, I can live with that.

So the end result was that I had Portal running on the plasma downstairs at full 1920 x 1080 resolution and maximum settings, getting smooth performance and sound through the HDMI cable.

I was done.  And finally I was able to sleep.