Dell VESA mode 103 conflict.

[William P]

I have a Dell Dimension E520 running QX6800SLACP @ 3.72GHz. I had a GTX750Ti that was working fine AHCI version.
I installed a sapphire dual BIOS R9-285 ITX O/C video card. Now I can't enter Dell BIOS SETUP due to "Video Mode 103 not supported by this graphics card".
So I either need to get the GPU BIOS to apply VESA mode 103, or change the Dell BIOS VESA mode to ??? Dell model# DM061.
BTW Throttlestop software allows control of voltage and multiplier from Windows on LGA775 with Core2 Extreme CPU. So some settings can be accessed.

[William P]

I came across a possible solution for this. While answering a Dell question at Tomshardware Forum I had an OP that was running an AMD RX570 in a Dell T5400 workstation. I asked him if he had the Vesa Mode 103 not supported issue. He said he had Error 43 (same thing) but when he loaded MSI afterburner it went away. So maybe someone at MSI bothered to do something about this.
I haven't had time to test this yet but I have an R9- Fury Nano for my old BTX, so I hope this works.

BTW Zotac GTX1050 Mini, and GTX1050Ti Mini are both single slot cards with 2 slot wide coolers. The cards are only as long as the PCIe 16x slot. So they're a bolt in 1080p for BTX Mini Towers (Optiplexes mostly).

[William P]

Another workaround for this iissue is a 2nd small GPU in the PCIe X1 slot that the BIOS can recognize and move onto booting the real GPU.