MY BUILD SPEC (all of this brand new less than 1 week old):I have an AMD socket AM3, Phenom II, X4 965 Black Edition, quad core 3.4GHz, retail boxed with AMD provided cooling kit.
It has 4 sticks of 2GB, Corsair RAM, matched kit with heat spreaders, for a total of 8GB.
Here's the board I have:
GA-MA790XT-UD4P now with the latest F7 BIOS as flashed from a bootable 128MB Staples USB flash drive
http://www.giga-byte.com/Products/Motherboard/Products_Overview.aspx?ProductID=3010Here's the dual PCI-e 1x gigabit network cards I want to use:
Dual gigabit ethernet, PCI-e 1x
http://forums.tweaktown.com/f69/ga-ma790xt-ud4p-startech-37135/In a case which is a Cooler Master 922 HAF, with a CoolMax 700W power supply.
It has a PNY Verto NVidia dual display (HD15, HDMI, DVI) 16x PCI-e video card in the 16x PCI-e slot on this motherboard.
It has an LG 32x SATA DVD/RW DL.
It has an NZXT Sentry 2, 5 fan, touchscreen fan speed controller (to keep the fans in the case quiet).
It has 4 Western Digital Blue 320GB, 7200 RPM, 8MB cache hard drive I want to run as RAID 10 (but have yet to be RAIDed).
The hard drives are using the Giga-Byte provided SATA cables.
The hard drives are connected on SATA0-3.
The CD-ROM is using the cable that came with it's retail kit on SATA4.
The case front eSATA is on SATA5.
The eSATA bracket is connected to the GSATA 1&2 ports.
THE GOOD NEWS:This system boots and runs fine.
I can boot Knoppix, OpenSuse, Ubuntu live CDs.
I have run it for several hours with no issue.
THE SITUATION:I have 3 of these StarTech RealTek RTL8111C PCI-e dual gigabit ethernet cards.
They are brand new, and I know they work because they work completely in an IBM XServer 3400 while seated in one of the PCI-e 8x slots (there are 3). I mean completely because from these exact 64 bit Live CD-ROMs I can boot that IBM server and use the cards with DHCP to surf the web.
These cards are PCI-e 1x. They fit the 3 PCI-e 1x slots on this motherboard.
THE MAJOR ISSUE:I can run the system as built for hours perfectly well, but if I put any of those 3 StarTech ethernet cards that I know work in any of the PCI-e slots on that motherboard, even the PCI-e 8x secondary slot, I get no video and no beep at post. If I remove the card, the system boots and runs fine. I had this problem with the F5 BIOS the board shipped with as well as the current F7 BIOS I updated to.
I know the cards worked before putting them in this system, and I know they still work fine after each was in this system.
I tried disabling the onboard sound, USB, firewire, RAID and serial port.
I tried locking the slots to 100MHz in case the default of AUTO was somehow wrong.
I have run no overclock, nor do I intend to overclock this build.
When I flashed the BIOS I tried both the failsafe and the optimal defaults.
WHY I WANT THIS TO WORK:I had hoped to put 3 of these cards into those PCI-e 1x slots to give this system a total of 7 gigabit ethernet ports as I plan on running Linux/BSD virtual machines on this system. Not being able to even boot the system with even one card in the slots would be a MAJOR issue however.
