Nvidia headaches or bad motherboard?

[Young]

I can't make the Nvidia drivers active, and can't detect the graphics
hardware or the monitor.

I just built a new system, and Ubuntu is giving me fits because of
Nvidia. I wanted to avoid Nvidia, but when you try to find a good
low/medium cost system with decent performance it seems to be the only
choice.

	Intel Pentium Dual Core E2200 Allendale 2.2GHz 1MB L2 Cache

	ECS GF7100PVT-M3  Motherboard with onboard graphics.
	North Bridge  	NVIDIA GeForce 7100
	South Bridge 	nForce 630i
	http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135066

Ubuntu 8.04.01-alternate-amd64 has problems which I described in the
thread "New System Problem", and couldn't solve.
---------------------------------
I've backed off to 32 bit and installed Ubuntu 8.04.1-desktop-i386.
Still having problems.
First its stuck at 800x600 max.

I tried the "System > Administration > Hardware Drivers" method from
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
and tried using Envy.

Both resulted in a message at the first stage of the boot process:

	Ubuntu is running in low-graphic mode.
	Your screen and graphics card could not
	be detected correctly. To use....

This gives choices of monitors and graphics cards and drivers to choose
from. But, the only thing that mattered is choosing a monitor. Any
choice larger than 1280x1024, or any choice of a graphics card or
driver will result in 800x600 graphics. And better than 800x600 will
then only appear after a second restart, after choosing 1280x1024 and 
nothing else.

I have a second machine, a KVM switch and second LCD panel, so I've
swapped out just about everything. The only thing I haven't done is put
the new 1680x1050 LCD on the old machine.

I installed read-edid on both machines. Only the old machine could read 
the edid info from the old monitor.
***Does this mean the new motherboard is bad?

The new LCD has been connected to the new machine with both the analog
and DVI connectors.

I couldn't get the Nvidia manual installation method to work. Its 
outside my skills, and I don't really think it will work, anyway.


Any ideas?