HP Microtower PC has No screen

[AmateurPCGuy]

Our school just got a HP Compaq dx2200 (refurbished) with an unknown PCI-E graphics card. When I tested the computer (with a 17" monitor connected to the Motherboard's VGA cable), the system won't display anything, but boots properly. Thinking that this is a "no boot" problem, I cleaned the RAM and the VGA gold contacts, and came up with the same result. After a little bit of thinking, I decided to removed the graphics card to the computer as I think that the computer bypasses the motherboard's display outputs, therefore the blank screen. Fortunately, the screen displayed the desktop. My question is, is it possible that the computer bypasses the MoBo's outputs and just scans through the PCI-E peripherals?

[FloGer]

It happened to me that at the first boot - before the graphics drivers were installed - the motherboard graphics outputs did not display anything, and I had to connect my monitor to the graphics card. Once I installed all the drivers correctly, it did not matter anymore. (I'm not using VirtuMVP)

 

It might matter if you're playing games, but I use my graphics card for GPGPU applications, so I prefer to have my display connected to the mobo with the GPU part of my CPU doing the displaying stuff, and keeping my GPU clear for the computations...