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Intensity Pro doesn’t work in Shuttle XPC
I am trying to get a new Intensity Pro board to work in a Shuttle XPC SX38P2 Pro system. This is a small form-factor system with just two expansion slots (both PCIe, 16 lane). One slot has the graphics card, the other the Intensity Pro.
I cannot get the system to run. When I install an nVidia 8600GT graphics card, it will boot and allow me to log in, but then a message appears saying that the system is installing a device driver, and after that it freezes.
When I remove the 8600GT and install an ATI 3670 graphics card, I see the BIOS screen during a hard boot, but then the display output is turned off and the monitor goes into sleep mode.
The system is running Vista (32-bit, SP1) and there are no BIOS settings to adjust PCIe slot characteristics. I have the latest BIOS firmware and chipset (X38) drivers, and I have cleared the Vista driver cache and loaded the latest Intensity Pro drivers.
Anyone have any other ideas on what to try next?
Thanks,
-Don -
2 Replies
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I’m assuming that a) the system boots fine without the Intensity Pro and that b) you also tried switching the PCIe slots between the video card and the Intensity Pro. Sometimes, the primary video card must be in a certain slot and some BIOSes have options to override that, but not all do.
These small form factor PCs, usually have a modest power supply (<=450W), so it's remotely possible that you are close to the capacity of the PSU, especially if you have all the memory slots full. How much RAM do you have? One possibility would be to try to boot the system with only one RAM stick and then keep adding RAM and rebooting until it doesn't boot. The other possibility (even more remote) is to look in the BIOS, with the Intensity Pro out of the system and see if you have an option that looks like "Memory Remap" or "Memory Hole". If this option is turned off, the BIOS and the OS uses the address spaces between 3 & 4 GB for system device addresses and OS will try to use it for software also, creating conflicts. If you don't have that much RAM, it's not a problem. I really doubt that that is your problem but you never know. The only other thing that I can suggest is to try to install the Intensity Pro in another computer, just to see if it works at all.
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Hi Jay,
Thank you for your thorough response. I have, indeed, gotten the system up and running.
What I did was the following. (Not all steps may be necessary, but I was trying to get things to work, rather than trying to find the most elegant route to a solution!)
I removed the Intensity Pro card and all ATI hardware and drivers and the Catalyst Control Center. I chose to remove the more powerful ATI card since it physically could only fit into one slot in the Shuttle.
I then installed the Nvidia 8600GT card in both slots (one at a time, of course!) and booted the system both times. When the card was installed in the “second” (harder to reach, shorter) slot in the Shuttle, Vista loaded some additional drivers on its own, and everything worked fine.
I then left the 8600 card in that PCIe slot, and installed the Intensity Pro in the slot that a video card normally goes in. That worked just fine, and now the system is running perfectly fine with excellent results from the Intensity Pro card.
Again, thank you very much for this detailed and thoughtful reply.
-Don
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