G400max small corruptions

[Madturk]

I have had my system up and running for about 2 wks now. The G400 is a great card, however, I am getting some corruptions (for lack of a better term) on some screens/icons. Most icons look great, execpt for some wich have some pink (magenta?) pixels around them. The ones I can think of offhand are: most all in Outlook express toolbar, some in quicken2000, and some toolbar in Ie/win explorer.

It looks like when you create a graphic with a magenta bground for transparency. It's not affecting performance but it's annoying.

Also once in a while I will get a slight vertical line (not complete, but just some pixels, it flickers a 1/2 sec or so and goes away) while playing Halflife.

I have most current drivers(non beta)/bios.

Matrox told me to go back to an older bios. The bios I have now is factory fresh.

System config:
abit be6-II
pIII450 (oc'd and not,same thing on video)
128mb pc133
sblive
adaptec scsi 2930
linksys 10t/100 card
usr 56k (ISA)
lava parallel card (extra parallel port)
ibm 34g hd (ata66), pioneer 10x dvd, and yamaha scsi cdrw.
hitachi 751 19" monitor.

any suggestions?

[Jorden]

pIII450 (oc'd and not,same thing on video)

Is it OC'd or not? For OC'ing the P3 or the G400 could give this strange behaviour.

Have you checked for heat? Is your mobo/G400 temperature very high? Try attaching an extra fan on your G400's heatsink. (a normal 486/pentium cooler is strong enough to do this)

At least give us your IRQ list. Maybe the G400 is using the same IRQ as another card.

Jorden.

[skeoch]

im getting the same problem, same mobo, you can almost get rid of it by going into advanced features and diabling caching bitmap in hardware.

suite/sweet!

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I have FLAK CANNON, U have FLAK!

[Madturk]

sorry, it is currently not oc'd. It was giving me the same problem oc'd and not oc'd. I doubt it's heat, I can recreate the problem instantly after the machine turns on.

As far as IRQ's...I'm at work right now and strangly enough don't have them memorized. But I do think it may be sharing with the scsi card on 9 or 11? I was really hoping that wouldn't casue the problem. I've switched the cards around too many time as it is.....

I will post them when I get home..

Thanks.

[JmsAndrsn]

I'm having the same problems and have posted this in this same forum. Another thing you could try doing is going into the BIOS and change "SDRAM LEADOFF" to 4 (rather than default of 3) in the "ADVANCED CHIPSET FEATURES" section. I have just found this out and it appears to work but I haven't had enough time to see that the problem does not reappear. Let me know if this helps.

[Madturk]

JmsAndrsn, That seems to have done it. Looks perfect so far... I will be watching to see if it reappears. I would also like to know how your agp registry hack works if you try it. I may try it when I get some free time (more than a few minutes to post to forums)

[JmsAndrsn]

Madturk,

The registry hack went pretty well. Thanks to everyone in the forum who helped me out with that. However, rather than describe my experience in detail for a second time, I am including a copy below of a reply I sent to someone else who had the 1X/2X concern. Here's what I wrote(sorry about the sloppy format):

I think as a safety feature(or perhaps the card just can't handle it) the card reverts back to 1X if the FSB is too high. But then again, I did a fresh install of the card at 100 FSB and upon first boot it actually showed 2X. I then changed my font size to "larger" and rebooted to find it set back to 1X. This 1X transfer rate at 100 MHZ(with 2/3 AGP divider) seemed a bit unreasonable. I then used a registry hack to force 2X AGP and this did the trick. However, I don't believe this 2X setting can be overidden so if the FSB is more than the card can handle, the system will get hung up
somewhre in the boot process. I tested this out and was able to go up to an FSB of 120 without having any problems(and all ID programs still showed 2X). I then tried 130 but the system would not boot into windows. I backed down to 125 and was able to get into windows and it seemed to work in a stable manner. However, when I went to restart I got a series of beeps right before the system went to post(I got this same result twice) and I had to redo all of my BIOS settings. Someone at a forum at www.murc.ws
said that there will probably be very little if any difference between 1X or 2X transfer rates.

Bottom line: Unless you want to back your FSB back down to the 120 MHZ area, you may just want to accept the 1X rate since it will probably make no difference. I guess you could maybe test if there is a difference by maybe running a graphics benchmark at 120 FSB in both the 1X and 2X modes to see if there is any difference. Here's the registry hack if you wan't to try
it but I would not try it much above 120 unless you want to redo all your
BIOS settings. Go to: HKey_Local_Machine\System\CurrentControlSet\
> Services\Class\Display\0000(may have to go into 0003 instead)\Settings\Cpu. When you get here, you need to add the following string "AGPFLAGS" and set the value to "-1" You will need to go in and delete this string if you get hung up at a certain FSB and want to move back up to a higher FSB with 1X AGP.

[This message has been edited by JmsAndrsn (edited 18 January 2000).]

[This message has been edited by JmsAndrsn (edited 18 January 2000).]