Frustratingly enough, after I removed the card and went back to my old combination of cards, or only one (tried both), nothing at all. I checked proper seating of things, unplugging everything nonessential from the motherboard, but no joy. I think I have a spare I can try swapping out; I'll try to track it down tomorrow in between the billions of other things I have going on.

Edit: Jonimus, jumper AND battery? That's odd and confusing.

*speed bump* So I found my spare mobo, swapped, and wonderful amazing excellent has ensued. I'm finding Eyefinity+bezel compensation very cool, although I'm a bit baffled about maximizing windows onto single LCDs thus far. Gaming with triple-monitor goodness is awesome. I have my four LCDs connected with one native DVI and three DP-to-DVI adapters, and my projector via DVI to VGA on the one DVI-A compatible port, but I think the third DP-to-DVI adapter, which came with a 24" Dell monitor, is passive rather than active, so I can't run all five displays at once yet.

Protip: Disable Eyefinity when you aren't gaming I've setup two keyboard shortcuts, ctrl-alt-e switches to Eyefinity, ctrl-alt-d switches to regular extended setup. It's easy enough to setup, just create two presets in CCC, one for eyefinity and one for extended. Then hit preferences->hotkey manager and setup hotkeys for them.

I'm very underimpressed with the Catalyst software; maybe I just need to upgrade. I bound my gaming profile to Ctrl-Alt-Shift-G for Gaming and my normal to Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F for Familiar, once I finally convinced the Catalyst application to stop undo my rearrangement on my monitors, but the Gaming profile mirrors the leftmost three instead of Grouping them into one or remembering my bezel stuff, and the first time I used the Familiar one, it set the rightmost to 640x480 until I Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F'd again.

Yeah, I have the problem where when I go from eyefinity to extended the monitor arrangement is screwed up, but I just hit the shortcut again and it fixes that. It worked fine previously, so hopefully they fix that regression soon.

Are you running 11.5?

I installed the version shipped on the CD, which I think is a 2010 version; I downloaded the update, but I didn't install it yet, because I wanted to play around with the setup a bit before I had to install and restart, so I never ended up installing it.

*facepalm*

You are such a n00b. Never install the drivers on the CD, they are always months out of date (if not years - seriously).

I hadn't installed the ethernet drivers for the swapped motherboard yet, cut me a little n00b slack.

o.0

Last time I had to install ethernet drives was exactly never ago - what on earth are you doing?

Don't look at me; I didn't design Windows 7. It didn't have a driver that worked with the motherboard's onboard ethernet port out of the box for no adequately explained reason. Anyway, I'm fairly happy with this; graphics are of course stupendous, and it's even much quieter because the HSF I had with this mobo has a 120mm fan instead of an 80mm.

My only qualm with this is that, in my experience at least, CD drivers always work, and drivers downloaded from the internet work about half the time if that. Even the scanner things that are supposed to identify the card are useless.

o.0

You are also such a n00b - you should know what card you bought and not use the scanner things (not that it matters, Nvidia and ATI use the same drive bundle for all of their cards made in the last 5 years). The CDs on the driver are merely outdated versions of the drivers, and they rarely work (or if they do work, they suck)

I was referring primarily to when I try to install drivers on a laptop I bought on craigslist(can't buy them new since I don't have a fancy 6-figure income). The card is never recognized by the the NVidia or ATI site or it's downloads, and the downloads from the manufacturer almost never work(particularly painful after upgrading my dad's laptop to windows 7) That said, the one time I did buy a graphics card for a desktop, the drivers it came with worked better than any I downloaded.

So at this point I'm thinking of waiting for the iteration after Sandy Bridge to upgrade my CPU/RAM/mobo, and just focusing on the possibility of monitor upgrades. I'm actually very happy now with my setup with my more powerful card and my (knock wood 1000x) much more stable motherboard.

Laptops are nothing like desktops. Up until just a couple years ago you *couldn't* get drivers direct from nvidia/ati for them because every OEM had to customize the drivers to work for the laptop. Since you are far behind the curve, the laptops you have aren't supported by nvidia/ati directly.

@Kerm: Not a bad plan. You're rocking a Core 2 Quad right now, right?

You've either gotten lucky, or you've been installing your OS from OEM backup disks that have your drivers built in.


The Device Manager: Use it (also PCI database).

For *ETHERNET*? Are you crazy? Windows and Linux both have excellent out of the box support for pretty much every ethernet chip you'll run into. Will you get GigE out of the box? Probably not. Will you get 100mbit out of the box? Absolutely, and you have for at least 10 years now. Nothing has really changed in this space so the generic drivers continue to work just fine.

And you forget who you're talking to. I know the difference between retail and OEM disks - I don't even have any OEM disks.

The last half dozen computers I've repaired have all been less than 5 years old, and all needed Ethernet drivers to be hand installed.

Same here. Pretty much nothing will work out of the box. That's why holding on to those disks is so important.

I think you've just gotten lucky based on our experiences, Kllrnohj. Correct, and with 8GB RAM. For the sake of bragging rights and geek cred I'm required to be at 16GB soon, but other than upgrading for the sake of upgrading my current rig is actually pretty solid.