M3450 won't POST with Radeon 7850 video card

roast2ford

Hello everyone, I was hoping you guys might be able to provide some insight on some issue's I'm having with my Aspire M3450. 

 

Long story short, I bought a Radeon 7850 here to go in my Aspire M3450 and whenever I install it the system will not POST.  The fans spin up and the system seems to turn on but I never get any video on my monitor and I never get the typical "success beep" from the system speaker.  If I put my current video card back in (an old Radeon 4890) then everything works fine.

 

Here's all of the troubleshooting I've done so far (my apologies for being long-winded lol)

 

1. The minimum power requirement for the 7850 is a 500w power supply unit.  My current PSU is 500w Rosewill.  I replaced the stock 300w to get the 4890 into the PC.  To make sure it couldn't be the PSU causing the problem though, I grabbed my friends 600w PSU and tested the 7850 and I got the same result.

2. It's not the video card because I tested it in my aforementioned friends PC and it worked.  Booted and went straight to Windows perfectly fine.

 

3. I updated the BIOS to version P01.A4 and got the same result (although that did fix some issues I had with some Valve games so yay!)

 

4. I cleared the CMOS by removing the system battery.

 

5. I removed the entire motherboard from the case and disconnected any "unnecessary" components (hard drive, usb ports, optical drive) that might be causing a short and preventing the system from booting with that particular video card installed.  Still no POST

 

6. While the system was out of the case, I removed ALL of the RAM and tried to boot up the PC with the 7850 to see if the mobo would even throw any "error beeps" at me, hopefully indicating the motherboard was performing some kind of self tests and at least attempting to POST.  I didn't get any beeps.

 

7. I reseated the processor just because I was running out of ideas at this point lol.

 

8. I chatted with Acer support who simply directed me to "local" Acer tech support (and there are none where I live) and "Answers by Acer", despite indicating here that the PC is supposed to support "AMD™ Radeon™ high-end graphic cards"

 

All these things considered, I'm fairly certain I've voided my warranty at this point lol. 

 

Nevertheless, has anyone had any success getting a Radeon 7800 series card into an M3450?  Am I missing something obvious?  And if I can't get my 7850 to work with this PC, what cards CAN I get to work?  Are 7800 series cards just incompatible with the M3450?  Should I look at Nvidia instead of ATI/AMD?

 

Again, my apologies for being so long winded.  I appreciate any advice you guys might be able to provide.

 

Thank you for reading!

 

 

 

Tommy-Acer

Thank you for the thorough and complete information that you have provided.

 

We were quickly able to read and determine the issue.

 

The specification for the PCI Express slot on the mainboard is PCI-E GEN2 2.0.

The specification for the HIS IceQ X H785QN2G2M Radeon HD 7850 is PCI Express 3.0.

 

A card would need to be PCI Express 2.0 to work on that mainboard.

nobodyuknow

Sorry, but Acer-Tommy is flat out wrong here. This is bad info, any PCI Express card will work in any PCI Express slot. The difference is at most a 1-2% performance decrease for running a 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot. You'll find that even the top-end PCI-e cards don't even come close to fully saturating the PCI-e 2.0 slot, and that bandwidth only becomes important if you're running a multiple card Crossfire setup. Hope this helps, don't throw out your PCI-e 3.0 card because it WILL run in your PCI-e 2.0 slot. In fact, I'm running a 3.0 card in a 2.0 slot right now, no problems whatsoever. If this card won't boot in your rig, PSU is the most likely candidate, though, I have heard there were many faulty 7850 cards, including the ones AMD sent to Tom's Hardware for review and testing. I know you stated you have a Rosewill 500w PSU which meets the minimum requirements, but if you have a lot of other hardware or drives already plugged into it you may not be getting enough voltage to the card. Additionally, I have had enough problems with Rosewill hardware that I've completely stopped using any of it.