I have a Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 motherboard with integrated graphics that shows up on lspci as an ATI Radeon 2100. I also bought a PCI-Express Nvidia graphics card so I could use the VDPAU feature on Linux (plays H.264 in hardware). The BIOS has three settings about which display to initialize first:

• Integrated graphics
• PCI graphics
• PCI-Express graphics (PEG)

I set the BIOS on PEG, but

• I cannot get anything, not even a splash screen or POST messages, to emerge from the PCI-Express graphics card. (I'm using a DVI connector; the card also has an HDMI output.)

• I cannot get the kernel lspci to see the graphics card; the only VGA controller it acknowledges is the integrated one.

• Running dmidecode acknowledges the existence of an x16 PCI Express slot, and it says

  Current usage: Unknown

There is an additional BIOS setting called "Internal Graphics Mode" which is normally set to "Auto" which means it is supposed to prefer a PCI Express VGA card. I set it to "Disabled" which now means I'm getting no output at all. I will soon be learning how to do a BIOS reset!

Other information:

• The PCI-E card is a MSI N210-MD512H GeForce 210. This is a fanless card.

• Although there are no fans to see turning, the heat sink on the PCI-E card is definitely getting hot, so the card is getting some sort of power.

• It gets all its power from the PCI-E slot; there is no external power connector.

• The BIOS is an AMI Award BIOS.

My question: how can I make the PCI Express graphics card visible to Ubuntu?