After some advice on my last post I got radeon 580rx graphics card along with a SDD and power supply.
Opening up the boxes makes me wonder if I'll need a larger computer case. This card is gigantic.
Wish me luck that I dont brick the whole thing in my attempt.
I swapped monitors to match the plugs. So I was using DVA and my card only supports DVI, I conveniently had a spare that supported DVI so I swapped them.
I considered the built in port to attempt a signal. But at this point its nearing bed time and I'm putting this on hold for the night.
I'll look into your advice and research how to go about that.
Fuck me though, replacing my motherboard wasn't this difficult. There I just plugged the power switch into the wrong place.
Okay, you've plugged in the 12 volt rail(s) cable to the video card. That checks
The trapezoidal plug is VGA. The square with a Dash is DVI. If the port on the monitor doesn't match the port on the card, you'll need a converter. You have a new card but the monitor is ostensibly older so you'll want a "DVI to VGA converter". Once you get that, you'll plug the VGA into the monitor, the converter onto the other end and converter into the video card. If that doesn't make sense, take a photo of the port on your monitor and the video card up to a place like Best Buy or a local computer shop and they'll hook you up.
It's always a good idea to remove the hardware drivers before you remove the hardware. It doesn't usually happen but the old drivers can interfere with the new hardware. I've never seen it happen with video card drivers except where there's an old and new of the same model or series. It's not a bad idea to plug your old card back in and start it up and remove the drivers, shut it down, and swap the new card back in. This isn't critical though, I think.
Your motherboard might be falling back to the built in video port. Try plugging your monitor into it and see if you get signal when you boot. Then you'll want to go into BIOS to see if you need to explicitly tell it to use an external card. I've seen some systems autoswap according to what has a monitor plugged in but that's kind of rare (in my own personal experience)
Oh, I'm going to mention this though you haven't... if your monitor has both DVI and VGA ports, you will need to make sure that it's trying to display signal from the correct port. So, effectively, you could plug the same monitor into two computers at the same time and swap back and forth (which is kind of cool, if you think about it). If you need to do this, you'll need to use the menu buttons on the monitor. But you haven't mentioned this so I don't think you'll need to worry here.