G400 & AX6BC Problems = Garbled Screen HELP!!!

[npitt]

Hello All,

I picked up a G400 32MB SH on Friday and I've had nothing but problems trying to get it going on my machine. I've formatted my C: drive; done a clean reinstall of Win98 (twice) and am using the 5.13.020 Powerdesk version; and I've upgraded the card's BIOS.

Here's my problem -- I've had this card working for just a couple of hours; and then I'll get a screen full of horizonal garbled lines which only a reboot will fix. It'd happen quite often; but now it produces this at the screen just after the Windows cloud screen during loadup at the 'Enter Network Password' screen. Nothing but scrambled lines -- extremely frustrating.

I've read similar problems here in this forum; and taking advice from those posts, I have my AGP Aperture size set to 128; but the AOpen AX6BC board that I'm using doesn't have a 'disable read around write' (or something similar) that I've heard helps if disabled.

My setup is at the bottom of this post; and I've set my Celery back to 300 to rule out the overclocking (I have my AGP jumper set to 2/3 when I goto 100FSB) This is just so frustrating because during the short time that I've had it working properly it looks INCREDIBLE! *SIGH*...:~(

Thanks for your time & help...

My setup is:
AOpen AX6BC
Celery 300 (oc'ed to 450 @ 2.0V)
64MB SDRam
MX300 Sound Card
G400 32MB SH
Quantum 9.1GB IDE

[npitt]

Oh, i forgot, I'm using DirectX 6.1 (if that matters at all...)

Thanks for your time & help. :+)

[Brent]

As you have dealt with the most obvious problems, from my experience, I would check thet the the card is very well seated as AGP cards are notorious for this. Secondly, I have had this problem when the card overheats and also if the power supply is on the weak/ unstable side of things, or there is an intermittent short in a system usually coinciding with heat build up. Also, I have had this on occasion when I have upgraded/ flashed BIOS's AFTER a clean install. By clean install are you just running setup again, even from DOS, or are you running fdisk to remove all partitions and then doing fdisk, format? You can download a utility from Quantum called zero fill which I have had to use once before when even fdisk would not get rid of something from my drive.
Cheers-Brent

[npitt]

"By clean install are you just running setup again, even from DOS, or are you running fdisk to remove all partitions and then doing fdisk, format?"

I just formatted my C: drive; I didn't remove any partitions. Maybe I oughta give that a try?

My card is properly in the AGP slot; so I don't think that that's the problem...

Thanks for your suggestion.

[ManojMahtani]

Have you tried setting in your bios the agp aperture to 256? I know you only have 64 Megs of RAM, but try it any ways.

Best Regards,

NotMM

[This message has been edited by ManojMahtani (edited 08-09-99).]

[npitt]

I had the Aperture Size set to 256 for a while -- but it made no difference.

Thanks for your suggestion.

[ManojMahtani]

Is the G400 sharing any resources with anything else?

[npitt]

"Is the G400 sharing any resources with anything else?"

Well, there's an 'IRQ Holder For PCI Steering' entry on the same IRQ as the G400, but it isn't sharing the IRQ w/ anything...(strange -- to me anyways)

Actually, my problem has gotten worse (i didn't think it could, but it has) now while in Windows (when it decides to load properly) it'll run for about 2 minutes and then BLAMMO -- garbled screen. I'm so lost as to what to do now...I've set my refresh rate down to 60hz (my eyes are bleeding and that doesn't make a difference at all' as well I set my APerture Size to 256 to no avail...

The only reason that I'm able to respond to this is because I had an old Matrox Productiva G100 4MB lying in my desk and I popped it in to use my computer...

MAN am I outta ideas...

Any other ideas/suggestions are gladly welcomed...

[paulcs]

This is a long shot, but here goes ...

I have an AOpen AX6BC board as well, and I accessed the forums today to report a fix I I found for some of the problems I've been having. (Lockups mostly. More on that in a separate post.)

It turned out I was having a difficult to diagnose IRQ conflict. My G400 and the ACPI controller were sharing an IRQ, although Windows didn't detect it, nor did SiSoft's Sandra. However, during the boot sequence, the AX6BC's BIOS lists a number of the devices installed and the IRQ's they are using. (This may be obscured by those annoying Windows clouds, in which case, you should disable them.) Sure enough, both were listed on IRQ 9.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find a clear way to manipulate or disable the ACPI controller, either in the motherboard's BIOS (v. 2.20) or in Windows. Tonight, I flashed the AX6BC's BIOS with ver. 2.36. Shazam! At the top of the Power Management section of the BIOS was a switch for the ACPI controller. (Why this wasn't in ver. 2.20, by no means an early version of the BIOS, I'll never know.)

I have tried to recreate the lockups I was experiencing, thankfully, without success. (Knock on wood.)

Again, I found out the G400 was sharing IRQ 9 with the the ACPI controller by watching what the BIOS reported as the computer booted. Windows only reported the video board and IRQ holder for PCI steering on IRQ 9, something it reports whether or not the ACPI controller is enabled.

Or you could be having a heat problem. Good luck in any case.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[npitt]

Thanks a lot for the suggestions. While my G400 & ACPI controller weren't sharing the same IRQ (I disabled it anyways) I think that perhaps I might have a heat problem as I had taken my G400 out to use my old G100 just to be able to use my comp.; after putting my G400 back in, it didn't produce any garbled lines (yet, anyway -- mind you it's only been about 20 mins) but unfortunately my OpenGL games locked up...:+(

I touched the heatsink on the G400 a couple of minutes ago, and it was very warm to the touch. Could it be a heat issue that causes the lockups? If so, what can I do to cool the G400 -- it's got a heatsink on it; and I don't know how i'd go about adding a fan to it...