Gigabyte 4550 Bad Choice?

N2Abyss said:

I still don't understand whats going on with the "Gigabyte" video card and why it won't work in the E4300, maybe I never will? , I did however get the old 4300 series card to work again and as long as I keep the resolution at 1024x768 or under, it seems fine.
But anything above that, and the white and green dots start to reappear again!

The only conclusion I can come to is my old 4300 series card may have been damaged by months of overheating, before the installation of better cooling.
As for the Gigabyte card, I think we have ruled out any Power,compatibility or cooling issues, from all the great input given here!
But it just will not work in the SFF........

I think that the HD4550 is simply a too-new PCIe 2.0 video card using GDDR3 memory that is simply incompatible with the 915G/ICH6 chipset found on that 2004-vintage motherboard. It is old and slow, and you are likely never going to be able to install a "modern" video card in that old motherboard newer than the HD4350 you say works (or worked) in it before.

I am going through a very similar problem right now, with a Supermicro C2SBX board that I bought in 2009. It uses an X38/ICHR9 chipset vintage 2007, which theoretically supports PCIe 2.0 x16 video cards. Well, in that machine I've been able to successfully use HD3850, HD4670, and HD4850 cards. But when I recently tried to install an HD5770 (PCIe 2.1 with GDDR5 memory) it failed. Machine would not boot, giving a 4-2-3-3- beep code (from Phoenix 2.0 BIOS).

And yet, that same HD5770 card can be installed in my other machine which has an ASUS P5Q3 motherboard that also supports PCIe 2.0 x16 video cards. However the P5Q3 also has a newer P45/ICH10 chipset, which obviously DOES support PCIe 2.1 video cards.

It's not a power supply problem, e.g. my C2SBX is in a machine with 600W and the P5Q3 machine has a 500W PSU, but both provide the 75W 6-pin PCIe power required by all of the video cards (except for the HD4670 which didn't need extra power).

I'm currently waiting on Supermicro tech support who's waiting on a response from Intel (who provides the C2SBX BIOS microcode for the Intel chipset on the board) to see if they have an update for the X38/ICH9 chipset that will support PCIe 2.1 video cards. But I'm not optimistic (unless say the routines from the P45/ICH10 can actually be used in the X38/ICH9 and they just never did it before).

So, bottom line: barring a miracle from Intel and Supermicro, the HD4850 is probably the final video card which will ever be used successfully in my C2SBX machine. The HD5770 is just going to have to be installed into the P5Q3 machine, with all of the other internal guts of the two machines (other than mobo, CPU, memory, PSU, and primary hard drive where Win7 lives) are going to be literally "swapped" between the two machines. I need to have the dual-DVI HD5770 at a location that requires dual-DVI, so if I have to move the ASUS P5Q3 board there because it supports the HD5770 then that's what I have to do.


I suspect you too may have reached the "ceiling" of your 915G/ICH6 chipset in that old Intel mobo you're using. The HD4550 is simply "too new", with newer technology on it than the chipset supports.

Thank you dsparber, very much!
being only a novice, I have no idea what you just said, but good old common sense kept telling me it had to be (In my terms) a PCIe architecture or chipset problem. I'm sure that's not the right terminology, but the only way I know to explain it from my end!
Although I don't completely understand all of which you describe, I think 99% of it applies to my situation.

Therefore, I'm returning the Gigabyte Radeon 4550 and trying a ATI Radeon 3450 instead.
I can only hope that I have cured the over heating issues within the case and this card lasts longer!
As well hopefully with the new 3450 card, my pin point green and white dots go away!
Thanks for the help..... and confirming what I thought I knew I didn't know!
N2