Dear Forum,
Long post, sorry...
It’s been a while since I posted here the last time, but I need your urgent advice.
I own the GA-880GMA-UD2H for my hptc which has been running great for the last 7 years (CPU 1090T & 16GB RAM) on Win 7 Ultimate.
My HPTC is basically a media and gaming center. Since a couple of games where not running properly with my current graphic card (msi 560ti twin frozer) I decided to get the EVGA 1060 GTX 6GB SC (single fan).
So far so good.
Now, 2 days ago the new graphic card arrived and I wanted to uninstall the NVIDIA drivers, I use Revo uninstaller for that usually.
Here started the first surprise, since Revo couldn’t uninstall the driver, neither the default uninstaller tool in “Programs and Features” could.
This never had happened to me before, that a driver can’t be uninstalled by any of 2 those programs.
After some thoughts I went to Device Manager, where I could see the onboard graphics and my 560ti and decided to uninstall the 560ti (but didn’t click on uninstall driver).
After that I rebooted, and now only the onboard graphics was available… I then read that there’s a program called DDU which uninstalls all graphic drivers, and so I did, but not in Safe Mode. I rebooted but Win did not make any attempt to adjust the resolution automatically neither.
The new Card
PC was shut down, all power cables removed, old card removed, new card placed in (with 6-pin connector plugged in ).
PC switched on but the new card was not detected…neither in BIOS, nor showing in Windows.
I was starting to panic since I thought that the 1060gtx maybe was DOA.
I cleared CMOS not by removing the battery (which I think it’s impossible to remove, is there a trick?) but by touching with a screwdriver both pins at the same time.
Booted into BIOS, loaded optimized defaults, disabled “Internal Graphics Mode”, enabled PEG on “Init Display First”.
In integrated Peripherals I chose “AHCI” in “OnChip SATA type” and “SATA” for “OnChip Sata Port 4/5) …not that it matters for graphics, but just wanted to be sure that this is correct (I have no IDE connectors on my htpc).
Rebooted.
Still no dedicated graphic card showing neither in BIOS nor in “Device Manager”. “This doesn’t look good” I said to myself.
I then found a way to enable hidden devices with the “set devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices=1” command in “Command Prompt”.
However, nothing found in “Hidden Devices” neither.
Old card back in
I then removed the new card and placed the old one in again (with 2 x 6 pins connecter plugged in)
And guess what, the old card, which was working perfectly fine for years is NOT showing up neither now…
What could have gone wrong here ? Did I maybe provoke this when I removed the old card physically ? Maybe I damaged the only pci-e slot it has ? I will blow some air into the slot, maybe there’s some dust inside…
I really do not understand what’s going on. Was it my mistake to disable the dedicated card in “Device Manager” maybe? I thought that this was reversible.
All was working fine until 2 days ago, so somewhere in the way something was screwed up, and I definitely think that maybe I might have caused it when removing the card.
I will give the new card to our technician in our company to test it out on another motherboard to see if it works, at least then I will know that it’s not DOA, but then I'll know that it's the mobo. RAM works fine.
I only have now left to install Win 7 again and see if gets enable somehow again, but I’m wondering if this will we of any help to be honest.
Sure, I could upgrade the whole machine to AM4, but I’m not willing to spend now money for a new CPU / DDR4 / micro ATX motherboard. The options on micro ATX for AM4 are very little as well.
Fortunately, I have found that someone is selling a used GA-880GMA-UD2H in Ebay and that would cost around 80€. New Hardware would cost much more.
What do you think? Have I missed something to test ? If you have any other idea or hint on how to re-enable the GPU, I would really appreciate that.
Sorry, I ended up writing a lot…
Kind regards,
Ken
P.D. I forgot to mention that the programm "Driver Easy" managed to detect my 560ti so I started to download the driver for it, but I fell asleep on the couch waiting for it to download. I'll be able to tell this evening what happened.
