OK, so I popped in the AGP Radeon 3850 board, and a new 500W power 
supply, because I knew the 320 watt that had been keeping my computer up 
and running was woefully inadequate for the graphics card. The new 
supply had a 24-pin ATX connector and my motherboard had a good ol' 
classic 20 pin connector. From the looks of it, the 24-pin beastie was 
designed to be "Universal" or so the manual states. Just line up the 
litte locking lug thinamajig and good to go. Hook in the additional 12v 
connector to the main board and connect the PCIe connector to the 
graphics card. Only the board is 8 pin and the power supply is a 6 pin. 
No problem, they have an adaptor that will connect to the board's 8 pin 
to 2 molex connectors. Just get one from each molex-chain and I'll be 
good to go. Flip the hard switch on the power supply (no smoke, yet... 
that's a good sign!) and punch the "On" button on the front of the 
computer. Success! It boots. Load up Vista, which has taken on the 
default resolution, and the computer promptly locks hard.

Hmm. Not good.

Reboot, and  ... Nothing! Really not good.

Fine, power down, make sure everything is seated well, and power up. 
Nothing for a few seconds (pretty normal for this motherboard on a cold 
boot) then I hear something from the speakers. So, I turn the speakers 
up.... It's a scratchy, poorly sampled, female voice stating repeatedly 
something that sounds astonishingly like "System failed CPU check"

Oh, crap! the new PSU fried the processor. crap crap crap. OK, maybe 
it's something else. In desperation, I yank the plugs from the new PSU, 
plug in the old PSU, and power up the computer. Same result. :( Double 
not good. My face turned pale, my wife kept asking if there was anything 
she could get me. "A new computer?"

Hmmm. Vexing. So, I put back in the old video card. Fire up the system, 
same disheartening result. Auggh. Wife pulls up the dell site, and hands 
me her card. "Just buy it" After arguing back and forth about purchasing 
a computer we can't afford on HER credit card (our main emergency card) 
I finally sit at her computer. As a last ditch, I keyed in Asus and the 
audio message I was hearing. Someone made a post on a Quicken forum (of 
all things) about forgetting to plug in the power supply to the video 
card. Aha! I intentionally didn't plug it in in an effort to speed 
things up when I put the old card in. So, I go back, plug it in and the 
system boots. Now, why won't the new card work?

Swap in the new card. Notice that it's precariously close to my old HDTV 
tuner that I haven't used since I finally bought a real HDTV. OK, that 
card can go. New card seems to fit well, so I tie it down, plug the 
power connectors in and hook up the new PSU. System boots.

I installed the drivers, and fired up Spore, which ran just fine. Nice 
and smooth on the movies, too. Good. good. Run the little Vista 
Experience test, and the system goes from 4 to 2.9 the Aero rating was a 
2.9 Hmmm. Well, I knew there were problems with Vista and this 
particular card, and handily ATI released a hotfix just for this 
situation. Started that install and went to bed.

Woke up, did some finishing touches, ran spore again. The intro video to 
the cell stage was glassy smooth. Niiice. Everything was definitely 
smoother. Everything was automatically cranked to max, too, in the 
settings dialog. Thanks for that :) Though it does expose the CPU bottle 
neck, since it procedurally generates textures, creatures, buildings and 
other things still have a basic color for a few seconds.

But, Spore was not the reason for this video card. Oh, no ... Spore only 
requires DX9. I wanted it for something that supports DX10. FSX. So, 
this morning I fired up FSX and cranked the sliders to medium-high, just 
to see what it did and it ran .... reasonably well. Again, exposing some 
of the bottle-necks expected on an aging AGP system.

I have yet to enable DX10 support... So, I'll have to try that later.

But I'm happy, if a little shaken by the whole installation nightmare.

In retrospect, "System failed CPU check" was probably "System failed 
video check" ...

I much prefer the characteristic 2 long beeps followed by 4 short beeps. 
I at least KNOW what that is, and it isn't subject to a subjective 
interpretation of poorly sampled speech.

The good thing is, even with the GPU-hungry FSX my new power supply ran 
as cool as can be.

-- 
~Mike

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