I once saved my bacon with an "old" (I don't really consider it old) 8 MB S3 PCI video card I had lying around.
I had bought an AMD chipset motherboard that assumed (in the BIOS) that you were going to use a CPU with onboard video (ie - an AMD "APU"). I was setting things up, and my CPU was an AMD without onboard video, because I figured the motherboard, like all the others I'd ever set up, would switch automagically to the PCIe video slot, which had my old NVidia GPU in it.
Nope. POST beeped that I didn't have any video output. So - I could either buy another CPU - or another mobo. Neither was an option. But I thought - maybe I could plug in a PCI video card and it would recognize that...?
Dug through my various boxes-o-junk and found one. Dropped it in, and it worked - long enough for me to switch the BIOS video option over, after which I could use my GPU.
I was kinda shocked at the BIOS, though - it was my first time using something "modern" - and it was a pretty GUI with a mouse and everything (then I started learning about UEFI which the mobo supported - a lot of things had changed since my last system, which was a Core2Duo board).
I had bought an AMD chipset motherboard that assumed (in the BIOS) that you were going to use a CPU with onboard video (ie - an AMD "APU"). I was setting things up, and my CPU was an AMD without onboard video, because I figured the motherboard, like all the others I'd ever set up, would switch automagically to the PCIe video slot, which had my old NVidia GPU in it.
Nope. POST beeped that I didn't have any video output. So - I could either buy another CPU - or another mobo. Neither was an option. But I thought - maybe I could plug in a PCI video card and it would recognize that...?
Dug through my various boxes-o-junk and found one. Dropped it in, and it worked - long enough for me to switch the BIOS video option over, after which I could use my GPU.
I was kinda shocked at the BIOS, though - it was my first time using something "modern" - and it was a pretty GUI with a mouse and everything (then I started learning about UEFI which the mobo supported - a lot of things had changed since my last system, which was a Core2Duo board).