Matrox Newbie Please Help

[Cowboy]

I'm new to the wonderful world of Matrox and I would appreciate some help. I just bought a G400 Max (Built in Ireland, 3 wire plastic fan) and I'm getting crashes when I use 3D acceleration.
System specs as follows...
Celeron 400 OC'd to 500, 83Mhz FSB, 2/3 AGP
Abit BE6
160MB PC100 Ram, 128mb chip & 32mb chip
10 gig WD HD
2.5gig Maxtor hd
Diamond MX 300
USR 56k modem (ISA)
Matrox G400 of course!
Samsung 6x DVD
HP 7570i CD Burner
4 Fans

I've tried several of the suggestions else where in forum such as...
-the seating of the card is perfectly straight and all the way in the AGP slot
It's on IRQ 9 all by its lonesome (except one PCI Steering)
-I've disabled my unused usb resources, unused com ports, and unused SCSI controllers (BE6 Ultra 66 Controller) as per Matrox Tech support Suggestion
-I've tried to change the position of my other cards, always leaving PCI slot one open.

What happens is my machine freezes, or the screen becomes a jumbled mess of colours.

I down loaded the tweak utility, but alas...not being a tech guy I'm not sure how to try making my AGP run at 1x. (I've read in forum that this doesn't really effect performance???)

Well any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks

Cowboy

[DuRaNgO]

try dropping to 75mhz fsb as 83mhz means that at agp 2x you're running the card at 166mhz instead of 133mhz, or force agp 1x with the reg hacks, and make sure that the card is fully seated in the slot by making sure the area along the slot and bottom of card is even
jim

------------------
PIII-500mhz @ 620! with an Abit BE6 mobo
128mb pc-100
Mill G400(YAHOO!!!) 32mb @ 165/205 with MGATweak), PD 5.30 & bios 1.5-22
Maxtor 14.3 gb Uata66 hdd
SB Live!
Winblows 98se & DX7
32 lbs. of fans, heatsinks and aluminum ductwork
3DMark Result 5954.69 3DMarks
Synthetic CPU 3D Speed 9325.69 CPU 3DMarks
Rasterizer Score 2791.72 3DRasterMarks
Game 1 - Race 65.07 FPS
Game 2 - First Person 54.89 FPS
Fill Rate 268.79 MTexels/s



[This message has been edited by DuRaNgO (edited 22 October 1999).]

[Maggi]

Howdy, Cowboy !

Grab the reg-patches from here:
http://www.murc.ws/Utils/PD5RegHacks.zip

Make sure your MAX is using entry # 0000 in the registry and apply the 'Force AGP1x' patch, reboot and everything should be stable ...

Btw, doing that you could change your divider from 2/3 to 1/1, the MAX should easily handle AGP1x at 1/1 83MHz FSB ...

------------------
Cheers,
Maggi
________________________

Working Rig:
Asus P2B-DS @ 103MHz FSB
Double Pentium III-450 @ 464 MHz
4 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead
Nokia 445Xi (21")
Nokia 447Xpro (17")

Home Rig:
Asus P2B-S Bios 1010 @ 112MHz FSB
Celeron 300A @ 504MHz
2 x 128MB CAS2 SDRAM
Matrox Millennium G400 32MB DualHead @ 150/200MHz
CTX VL710T (17")

[Dennis1]

Hi Cowboy,

I am posting also on this forum now to get my g400 going on the Be6 motherboard (see other topics made by me Dennis1 today).

After reading on these forums since I have bought a G400 I see that so many people have problems running these card on a abit Motherboards especially the Be6, there is some kind of conflict going on between the hardware.

The things that I will try this weekend to get it running is after some replys I get from various people today

- change the IRQ for the G400, you have to change the P_IRQ0 BIOS setting. Set it to either 11 or 10.

- Set Agp aperture size to 128 or 256 MB

Good luck, let me know what happened

Dennis

[Jorden]

Dennis1, check at http://forums.murc.ws/ubb/Forum5/HTML/005330.html
for more info.

[Snake-Eyes]

Thanks for the info Dennis. Although I'm not having any of the above mentioned problems with my Abit BE6/G400Max, mine is on IRQ7 right now. I'm thinking of trying your solution to force it to IRQ10 or 11, just have to see which one currently has my 2940UW on it (it's only device- the other IRQ, whichever it is, has two devices, of which one is my SbLive!Value), and try moving the G400 there. What do you guys think, should I take the chance if I'm having no problems right now?

------------------
Ace

[Cowboy]

Wow! Thanks for so many quick responses!
This question is for maggie if she comes back.
#1- where do I look in the registry to check if my max is # 0000 (and what does that mean?
#2- once I use the reg hack, how do I know if it IS down to 1x.
thanks...and remember I'm new so I pretty much need things spelled out for me.
Thanks
Cowboy

[Zwisch]

Yeah! my Abit BE6 cut and paste!


ohhh.... one of these BE6 Mobo... hmmm, I simpathize budy!
First, there are several issues with this Ultra DMA66 on this board. Try putting your drivers on the Ultra 33 and disable the ultra 66 in teh device manager to see if it helps.

Then for this mobo :
-PCI slot 1 shares it's ressources with the AGP
- PCI slot 2 is ok (houra!)
- PCI slot 3 shares with the Ultra 66
- PCI 4 and 5 shares together...

So all hail bus mastering on this boards!!! Abit also says that they have major issues when USB is sharing with the Ultra 66...

So better check these settings first!

Z

[Cowboy]

Thanks again for the reply!
I have already disabled the UDMA 66 controller in device managaer, (thankfully I'm not using them yet).
My only other devices are my Diamond MX300 in PCI Slot 2 and my usr modem in the first ISA Slot.
Thanks
Cowboy

[DuRaNgO]

move your soundcard to the third slot, it worked best that way when I first put mine together

------------------
PIII-500mhz @ 620 ! with an Abit BE6 mobo
128mb pc-100
Mill G400 (YAHOO!!!) 32mb @ 165/205 with MGATweak), PD 5.30 & bios 1.5-22
Maxtor 14.3 gb Uata66 hdd
SB Live!
Winblows 98se & DX7
32 lbs. of fans, heatsinks and aluminum ductwork
3DMark Result 5954.69 3DMarks
Synthetic CPU 3D Speed 9325.69 CPU 3DMarks
Rasterizer Score 2791.72 3DRasterMarks
Game 1 - Race 65.07 FPS
Game 2 - First Person 54.89 FPS
Fill Rate 268.79 MTexels/s

[Cowboy]

I would like to thank everyone for the suggestions and help. Due to the help i received from this post I managed to stop my crashes. Currently the only crashes i'm getting are due to software not supporting or recognizing the card ie: NFS:High Stakes.
Well Thanks to everyone!
This is absolutely the most helpful and responsive Forum EVER!
If i have anymore problems, i will not hesitate to post.
Cowboy

[GinoCyber]

Hey Cowboy, Maggi is not a she

Ciao

[Bohrn]

NFS4 will (should) run even if it detects "D3D device 1" It still runs well on mine.

------------------
AssuP2B ,iCeleron337, 128megs PC100, G40032megSH, Yamaha PCI sound, 2 small HD's, 42X Sony CDrom and 98SE w/shutdown patch, PD 5.30 w/beta ICD

[Cowboy]

Sorry Maggi!

Cowboy