Marvel G400 Boot problem driving me nuts

[Trinity]

I have an Asus P3B-F motherboard with the
latest BIOS. Whenever I cold boot my computer, I get a blank screen and 3 beeps
which is the Award BIOS indicating some kind of video card problem. I'm using Win98 SE.

If I reboot again, it will always work.
If I reboot after the computer has been on for a while, it always work as well.

The only time it fails to boot is the first time it is turned on in the day or if it has been turned off for more than an hour or so.

I've checked:

- that the Marvel is pushed firmly into the AGP slot

- that there are no IRQ conflicts. The Marvel is on IRQ 11 along with an IRQ holder
for PCI steering.

- that there is no card in PCI slot 1

- I've played with various BIOS settings to no avail; Video Aperture Size, Shadow Video BIOs, Video Mem Cache, PCI/AGP sequence etc.

Other than the boot problem, everything about the Marvel works fine; no crashes or lockups whatsoever. It does everything it's supposed to. Having to boot twice is very annoying.

Any ideas what might be causing this? Are there any Matrox diagnostic programs to confirm that the Marvel card is not at fault?

Thanks.

[This_Idiot]

Trinity,

This sounds pretty odd. Since it is happening from the bios check, it can't be an IRQ or other OS problem. Please can you pull all other cards apart from the Marvel out of the machine and see whether you still get the same problem ?

[DrMordrid]

Yup...one long and two short beeps are supposed to indicate a video card checksum error.

I have a P3B-F and my Marvel runs like a top in it. Actually it's one of the best boards I've had in some time.

Before you do anything else though you might want to put in the 1004 bios update for the P3B-F as it does fix some bugs.

This can be a hard one to track down unless you have another machine around. If you do put the Marvel in there and see if it works. If you get the same or a similar error then it may be a bad Marvel.

If the Marvel works in the other machine then the onus shifts to the P3B-F.

Dr. Mordrid