I just bought a N9600GT, it plugs into my PC fine, the fan starts running but I am getting no signal on the monitor, I tried it with my 19" LCD and 50" plasma.
If I unplug the monitor from the graphics card and plug it back in the monitor restarts and says no signal again.
Graphics card is not inbuilt, I just wanted something to run LFS a bit better, my current graphics card is a Radeon X300SE so this one is a bit upgrade
If you plug your X300 back in does it work again? Have you tried the 9600GT in another machine?
What sort of PSU are you running? You need to have 18A on the 12v rails so my next bet is that your PSU isn't capable of running the card. It may very well have enough to run the fans but not enough to actually function (if I only have one of my two PCI-6 power cables in, the fans on my graphics card goes completely crazy but doesn't work until I have both plugged in)
I think I'm also right in saying that the 9600GT requires a PCI-6 power adapater as well, if your PC is completely standard (IE bought with relatively low spec from a shop, which as it had a X300 in it, I imagine it would have), you probably have a generic 250w PSU which would have neither the PCI-6 power adapter nor the headroom to power the card, even if it did.
Check on the PSU in your machine (there would probably be a sticker which shows the amperage and watts etc). As a basic rule, 350w minimum would be required for this card and it must be able to supply 18a on the 12v rail (any fairly recent and well branded PSU would be able to do this for a small price)
So, yeah, 200 Watts is the least amount of power you need to be able to run a computer, and that's with out a CD ROM drive, and just a single hard drive.
If he's running a 210w PSU (or attempting to) with a 9600GT then of course he would not know the difference between the VGA slot on the card and the one on a motherboard (if applicable).
As I said the PSU is completely useless so if you install a more powerful PSU (I would recommend OCZ or Corsair personally) with at least 400w you should be fine. Alternatively in your position I would upgrade to a 750w+ PSU from a good brand which should allow overhead for future expansion.
I'll go price up a few tomorrow, this isn't really a high end gaming computer but I would like something to play games with some decent graphics.
If you think 400 is enough i'll go with that, I'm only running one internal hard drive and two externals for media.
From what I can see in the internals it is only the DVD drive, hard drive and graphics card that requires a power input.
On his current rig, if it's running on a 210w with the X300 then for his needs (with the 9600GT) a 400w would likely run the graphics card without a problem.
If he would like the scalability in the future then yes, the more watts the better (but remember that watts output is not the be-all-and-end-all....the amps availible on the rails matters as well!
The external harddrives are likely self powered so are not powered by the USB slots. A good brand 400w PSU will run the 9600GT but as mentioned it's recommended if you can afford to, to get a better one.
To be honest, my 600W OCZ PSU broke and I replaced it with a friends 450w Corsair one, which runs my Q6600, two CD drives, also powers all of my USB devices (webcam, iPod, keyboard and mouse) and powers an ATi 2900HD which is widely regarded as one of the most power hungry (and crap) graphics cards you can buy. It uses two 6 pin PCI power adapters FFS!
That should do it, but if you can try to buy some , Powercooler / Antec / Corsair / Thermaltake Toughpower / Cooltek, that's brand are good and have good prices
@s14
A Corsair PSU is awesome psu, if the psu say 450W you got 450w, there are toons of psu that say 500w and barely trow 350w...
A 750 watt PSU is massively overkill for what he's trying to achieve. I run a Core i7, a GTX285 and 3 HDs and I've never seen power consumption go above about 400W (my fan controller has a power readout).
) via cable?