G400 unstable in bus master mode... ideas?

[Gareth Randall]

I have the 16Mb G400 OEM (5.31 drivers)running with an Abit BM6 mobo (440BX chipset), a Celeron 466, Win98SE and an unbranded 128Mb DIMM (66MHz).

It's rock-solid stable with bus-mastering turned off. With it on, I can usually expect total screen corruption within a few minutes of rebooting - *unless* I go into a program that makes use of hardware 3D.

I've been able to leave the Matrox Tech Demo, Quake 2 and Half-Life all running overnight with no problems... until I quit out of them. Then they either go bang straight away, or within about 30 seconds.

I'm no tech-head, but I have a feeling that the problem is either the video drivers or my unbranded memory... any ideas?

[Gareth Randall]

I've since managed to get it running stable - the problem was trying to run it at AGP 2x. I used the registry hack to force it to 1x, and everything's been fine since.

It's annoying that it won't run stable at 2x, though - my chipset supports it.

[RAB]

The first thing to try is to turn off DMA on your CD/DVD-ROM drive. Go to Device Manager and uncheck the DMA box under the CD properties. In addition to making things much more stable, it might also let you run your G400 at full AGP 2x with busmastering enabled on the G400.
RAB

[High_Jumbllama]

I have the same issue and it seems that immeidately after a driver install with defaul settings it works. When I get the chance, I am going to do a registry compare to see if I can create reg file(s) to reset some settings for the next boot.