P67A-UD5 Cannot POST with a PCI video card inserted

[paincakes]

I cannot get my P67A-UD5 to POST with a PCI video card inserted. The system just enters a boot loop, powering on and off over and over. I typically use two graphics cards to achieve a 4 monitor setup using a PCI-E and PCI video card. The system will POST with a Nvidia  PCI-E 9800GT inserted alone, but when a Nvidia 9400GS PCI or Nvidia 8400GS PCI is inserted the boot loops begin. I tried booting the system alone with just the Nvidia 9400GS PCI inserted and the boot loops began again. I tried inserting a Creative Labs X-FI PCI card to make sure the PCI ports are working and the boot loops did not happen. I am using an i7 2600k, 16GB of Corsair Vengeance RAM @ 1600 XMP. BIOS has been Q-Flashed to F3 revision. Any help appreciated.

Update: Beta BIOS F6A did not help the situation.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.

You don't mention the most important part of your setup, the PSU. What make/model do you have and how old is it?

[paincakes]

The power supply is a 2.5 year old Antec Neo Power 650 watt. I ended up replacing the PCI 9400GS I was using with a PCI-E 8400GS and it seems to have worked around the problem. For some reason the board will not boot up with a PCI video card inserted. I am now using 2 PCI-E cards to achieve my 4 monitor setup. One in the 16x slot for my main displays and one in the 4x slot for my extra screens.

[Dark Mantis]

Oh well happy to see that you found a way around the problem. I wasn't aware that using two different standards of cards would stop booting and I am sure that there should be some way round it, but as long as it is working now.

[Julian]

I have a very similar situation with a GA-P67A-UD3 rev 1.1, updated to the most recent BIOS offered by @flash, just yesterday, F6.

The system is not overclocked and otherwise very stable.

When I insert a Kworld PI610 DVB-T & 1394 card, the system goes into a similar boot loop to that previously described. The system never comes up with the BIOS screen, but seems to power down after about 10 seconds or so, before trying to power up again.
When I insert a gerneric 1394 card, the system boots fine.

Both cards work fine in an old Dell Optiplex 755 which is based around the IntelQ35/ICH9, but I don't want to use that anymore.

I'm sure that this isn't a PSU problem as I have two video cards installed, one PCIeX16 and the other PCIeX4. If I remove one of the video cards, the system still won't boot.

So, some more detail about the cards...

The working 1394 card is 3v3 and the main component is a TI TSB12LV23 chip, which is compliant with the PCI 2.2 specification.
The card which upsets the P67A-UD3 is also 3v3 and has a PLX PCI6140 PCI-PCI bridge chip. On the far side, there is a TSB43AB22A (PCI 2.2) and an NXP SAA7131E (PCI 2.2).

I believe that the GeForce 9400 and 8400 are basically PCIe based GPUs and that the PCI versions of these cards use a PCI-PCIe bridge.

My best guess as to what is happening is that the BIOS isn't expecting to see another PCI-PCI bridge, so can't allocate space for the BARs in the devices on the far side and just gives up.

I'd like some confirmation that the BIOS can cope with the depth of bridges that results from this configuration and if not whether I can expect a BIOS update which would fix this.

Thanks,

Julian