Matrox G400 on my athlon... problems problems problems :(

[THELAIR]

Okay... my system has been running fine for the past week...
however last week i pulled out my matrox, plugged in a geforce...and enjoyed that for a few days (it was borrowed)
then i plug my matrox card back in and have all sorts of problems.. basically when i boot up im in 16 colour mode (not 16 bit), and 640x480.

I uninstall the matrox drivers iwth the unistlal utility, and whne it boots up i reinstall it..still didnt work.

Alas there were some asus drivers that were conflicting so i toastd them, unistalled the matrox drivers again then reinstalled...voila it worked.


However just about an hour ago, i turned of my system to plug in a hard drive..this is after about a good 4 hours of quake, and half life opfor, which made my motherboard temp rise from 28 (which is my normal/stable temp) to 38 Celcius.

So i turn it off, plug in my hard drive..which never worked..so i gave up on that and rebooted... whamo im right back in 16 colour mode and the crap that goes along with that.

So now i dont know what to do... I have tried EVERYTHING, i have removed it a million times and reinstalled it from the latest drivers to the ones on the CD.

Basically what happens is when i run the unistal utilty... it boots up and detects the card as a standard VGA card. Asks for a driver, i point it to the direction of the folder where the latest driver files are... then it reboots..when it tries to log into windows, it displays the lil windows 98 logo, and then just at hte point where the screen goes to prompt you for the login/pass it just freezes..it goes blank. That is where it changes the resolution...

so i have to reset and reboot...then it loads up, but back at 16 colour and 640x480, and says the display settings you chose do not match your hardware....

So i dont know if its just heat related... or what. So hard to say.

I could reinstal win98 but im not in the psotion to do that just yet...there has to be another way

I have also been reinstall the AGP miniport driver, but that shouldnt have to be used.

any suggestions?

(yes im using the offical matrox uninstall utility program)

System specs:

AMD Athlon 550 @ 700
Asus K7M Bios 1.07 revision 1.04
64 MB Ram (namebrand)
Matrox G400 16 mb AGP latest drivers and turbo gl
3com nic
maxtor 6.4 gig HDD
win98 SE

[THELAIR]

reading up some stuff here

the vid card is shared with IRQ 11.. which also has PCI Control steering on it as well...

no sound card (built in motherboard sound), and the stop PCI slot is free, nothing in there

[Zwisch]

Hi,

You have the AGP miniport... do you also have the BusMastering patch applied for you VIA southbridge? Do you have a recommended powersupply?

It is normal for your G400 to share with the IRQ Holder for PCI steering... you wil never be able to get rid of this.... Is your other card in PCI slot 2? Since the K7M is sharing the rest of his PCI slot with other devices (AGP-SLot 1 and 5 together, PCI 3 with USB and PCI 4 with your onboard sound...).

Is this a fresh install of win98? Did you enable USB BEFORE installing windows?

[THELAIR]

Okay this is not a fresh reinstall, like i said, i just turned it off, to install a new hard drive and i start gettin all the funky green horizontal and vertical lines

i just now unplugged the drive and re plugged it back in... re seated it as it were... to no avail...

other suggestions?

[THELAIR]

well i threw out the g400 and plugged in a voodoo3 3000 and well whaddya know it works JUST FINE!!

grr why cant i get this damn g400 to work

i see that alot of other people are getting "odd/erratic" display crap on their screens like myself, and are suffering from random freeze ups and stalls...what is the solution to this problem?

ANYTHING I DO, pushes me back to 16 colour and 640x480

and yes i re installed my via pci drivers...
like i said, this has been working fine for hte past month since i got htis athlon..till now and that one lil blurb back last week with the geforce....yes i checked to make sure we got all the asus outta the registry...

damn it people, im getting pissed off now

and im talking to another guy who had the same problems on a similiar setup and he just returned the card
I DONT WANT TO RETURN THIS CARD


help

help me!!!!!!!!

[THELAIR]

Well, i checked one last thing... any reference to Nvidia in the registry and 2 items popped up..so i toasted them...and bam it loaded ...

amazing

[Greebe]

Shame nobody else has an uninstaller like Matrox. If they did, you wouldn't have had all those problems!

------------------
Designer of the first commercial Athlon mod. Currently marketing the "Eclipse" through AZZO Computers.
Anyone up for an Eclipse'd Athlon 850? Email me (epc@netdirect.net) for more information

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[Thundrchez]

I've got a K7M/Athlon/G400 system that was having the same kind of problems on cold bootups.

Downloading the PD 5 Registry hacks from the MURC utils and installing the forceagp2x.reg fixed my cold bootup problems. For some reason, on cold bootups this combo likes to hang with a "plaid death" unless you force agp 2x.

Also on p. 19 of the K7M manual it will show you how to adjust the VIO of the AGP. Asus ships the K7M with it above spec at 3.4V. Change it down to 3.31V.

[Greebe]

Thunder, They leave it that way because typically you can run with a higher degree of stability if overclocking.