ABIT motherboard compatibility

[Haig]

Star - "IMHO it doesn't make much sense to have known critical G400/mobo combinations run some demos for days. They may pass simply because no critical situation ever occurs in these demos."

What about heat, noise, and maybe a memory leak? We haven't ruled out these 3 yet.

"It's about time Matrox made it clear whether there is a problem in the hardware of some G400s only or a logic-related bug that might affect all G400s."

Don't you think that we should reproduce the problem first?

Robert - "One thing that is not clear to me about Matrox' trouble shooting approach. If substituting a different G400 fixes the problem (reported by at least one poster), then it would seem to me that it would make sense to examine the characteristics of that (and other failing) g400s in detail and search for differences relative to other g400s that work."

The boards we recieved from BC and others are NOT locking up on our Abit boards.

For the clients that had the lock up problems, they managed to have it fixed with different ways. For the ones who still couldn't, a new card did the trick.

We don't just put these cards in a system, stare at it and pray that it will lock. We examined these cards against a newer batch of cards to make sure that all components are working equal.

You guys should give us techies more credit than that.

Haig

[cjolley]

Haig,
Be of good cheer! The vast majority of us do.
chuck


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ABit BH6 w/ Celery 333@500, 128mb gh@cas2, 10gb IBM@7200, SB Live Value@44kh, noname CDRom@40x, Mitsumi CDRW@2x2x8, Zoom@56k, Princeton EO75@1024x768x32x85hz, USB mouse,Matrox G400 MAX!!!!

[jmack]

I'm not experiencing lockups, but I originally had severe corruption with my BE6. I put it in a BX6R2 and it worked fine. A week later I put it back in my BE6 - it worked fine? It has been ok till yesterday when I needed to test the overclockability(new word) of 2 c366's. I pulled the ATX power plug put in new processor and restored power. On bootup the corruption was back. Put G400 (metal blaede canadian max w/2wires) back in BX6R2 this time corrupted here too. When I gave up on this and put it back in the BE6 with the suspected corruption, I noticed a 50% reductionin the amount of onscreen graphics when I slightly flexed the one unsupported corner of the G400. I rebooted and everything was fine. Been torture testing it fo a day and all is well. The G400 was seated fully on every reinstall, and I am left wondering if there might be a tolerance trouble between the card and the AGP slot here somewhere. Any Idea Haig?

[Scytale]

He he... Haig, when a problem analyses is done for 80% even sensible people will jump on the bandwagon complaining about why the remaining 20% hasn't been addressed yet, and shouting that the initial 80% of work was pointless from the beginning...

[Scytale]

Robert, NT4 (I'll assume you're talking about NT4) does not support AGP2X. I never had a stability problem running NT4SP5+G400 either. Then again, as long as I restrict my card to AGP1X mode, W98 has no problem keeping the G400 on track either. It's the combination of AGP2X+busmastering messing up. AGP2X by itself, w/o BM, does not seem to be a problem either...

[dneal]

Sorry to see you guys are having so many problems with you G400's and BH6's. I have a BH6 and just haven't had any problems at all. Maybe it's luck of the draw and some BH6's have problems...my BH6 is over a year old now though.

I also have a SBLive working with the G400 fine.

Just use the latest BIOS, drivers, DX7, try popping some of your other cards out. My G400 is using these resources with zero problems.

Memory Address: 000A0000-000AFFFF
Memory Address: 000B0000-000BFFFF
I/O Range: 03B0-03BB
I/O Range: 03C0-03DF
IRQ: 5
Memory Address: EC000000-EDFFFFFF
Memory Address: E8000000-E8003FFF
Memory Address: E9000000-E97FFFFF
Memory Address: 000C0000-000C7FFF
Memory Address: E8010000-E801FFFF

System Config:
ABIT BH6 rev 1.0
Pentium 2 SL2W8 300MHz -> 464MHz
192MB SDRAM
10GB Maxtor 4320
4.3GB Quantum Fireball ST
Toshiba 6X DVD
Sony CDU628E 8X/2X CDR
Matrox Millenium G400 DH @ 150/200
Creative SBLive Value
3Com Fast Etherlink XL PCI
Supermicro SC70 ATX 235watt PS
Panasonic Panasync S17

[ALBPM]

rinkol,
If you intend to use the AT/66 you need to disable your Primary IDE in the Bios and then again under Device Manager in WN98. Also be sure the At/66 controllers aren't sharing an IRQ with the USB controller or any other device requiring Bus Mastering.
Mine is sharing an IRQ with my SoundBlaster Live and working great.

Paul

[rinkol]

albpm - It shouldn't be necessary to disable the primary ide channel (ide 1) to use ata 66 (unless the irq is needed for something else). In any case , when I was having ata66 misery, I tried disabling ide 1 and 2 without benefit. I'm pretty sure that I never had problems with irq or other resource conflicts. In Windows NT, I could get it so that I wouldn't normally get a full ata66 lockup, but I would get pauses which coresponded to hpt366 (i.e., the ata66 controller) timeout errors shown in the event viewer.

Another question. Does anyone who gets agp x2 lockups ever have problems with the standard microsoft windows 3d screensavers???? I tried the 3d pipes screensaver a few times and was surprised that they wouldn't hang up, even if run overnight. If I recall correctly, I could even loop an mp3 and start the screensaver by previewing it, so the simultaneous use of a pci sound card (pci 64) did not even seem to be a factor.

Thanks
Robert Inkol

[bcronin]

All my lockups were in 2D mode, doing nothing more complicated than opening common things like "My Computer" and "Display Properties". I'm beginning to wonder if this might be a RAMDAC issue of some sort. Haig, you might try beating on my old board with resolution set to 1152x864, 16 bit color and a refresh rate of 85Hz. Thats the mode I run my desktop in all the time. Maybe it is related.

------------------
Cheers,
BC

[cjolley]

I'm begining to like jmack's idea.

Why don't those having try pulling the card out and replacing it. Maybe acouple of times. Not just wiggling it or looking to make sure it is seated.

A mechanical connection problem would explain a lot of the strange qualities of this problem.

chuck


------------------
ABit BH6 w/ Celery 333@500, 128mb gh@cas2, 10gb IBM@7200, SB Live Value@44kh, noname CDRom@40x, Mitsumi CDRW@2x2x8, Zoom@56k, Princeton EO75@1024x768x32x85hz, USB mouse,Matrox G400 MAX!!!!

[surferpop]

When I installed my first max(Canadian)in
my dell p2450 it would lock-up at the desktop. The only way I could get it to work at all was go into safe mode and force agp 1x.After looking in the registry I noticed that I had both an 0000 and an 0001 entry
in display.I deleted both, reinstalled the drivers(oooo entry only) and lo and behold it worked fine.No lock-ups and agp2x.

When it wasn't working I had returned the card and received a card manufactured in Ireland(with 3 wires).I installed it with no problems.
Then...I installed dx7 and started having occasional lockups with d3d apps.

I've just built a new machine with a bx6r2,
p3550 @616,xitel storm platinum and I'm using dx7.

No lock-ups....no problems at all.
Go figure

[cjolley]

It would be real easy to forget that you pulled the card to look at the fan for example.
This would explain why replacing the board always seems to fix it.
Someone give it a try!!
chuck


------------------
ABit BH6 w/ Celery 333@500, 128mb gh@cas2, 10gb IBM@7200, SB Live Value@44kh, noname CDRom@40x, Mitsumi CDRW@2x2x8, Zoom@56k, Princeton EO75@1024x768x32x85hz, USB mouse,Matrox G400 MAX!!!!



[This message has been edited by cjolley (edited 10-04-1999).]

[Rob M.]

It's definately not bad connections in my case. I've tried 2 max's in 2 totally different abit systems and had the same problem. Each time I was sure it was plugged in properly as well. I still believe that changing the cpu voltage does something. I still crash, but no where near as fast as when I'm at 2.0 where I normally crash within a few seconds of bootup.

[SCompRacer]

While amends were made after the post, Haig shouldn't be publicly 'stoned' in any forum. He does not have to answer post's in any, and I believe has gone far beyond his assigned job description at Matrox to help us all.

[Scytale]

One tiny little pebble wouldn't hurt, would it?