Brian The Dog on 6/12/2009 at 03:43

---

It's a bit dependent upon the graphics card. My 7950GT has a 6-pin adapter and will happily run without it (but give a warning in Windows that 3D rendering is disabled due to lack of power to the card), whereas a 6600 we tried in the office wouldn't display anything at all unless its own power was connected (in this case, standard molex). But you're right, a working card that isn't drawing enough power should still allow the PC to POST, you just won't get any video output. The POST beep codes should have told you if it was anything to do with RAM/CPU etc being faulty.

Edit - just a thought, do you have any other PCI-E device you can plug into the PCI-E slot? It doesn't have to be a graphics card, many internal cards are moving over to PCI-E from PCI nowadays. PCI-E x1 will work fine in a PCI-E x16 slot (but not the other way round). This would let you check the PCI-E slot.