AGP x4, Matrox G400MAX on Asus p3v4x

[cancer]

I know this is a hot topic but i thought i'd ask anyway. i've just upgraded my MB & CPU from an AbitBH6 to an Asus p3v4x & Celery 300a@450 to a P!!! 550e@733(need more cooling to get more speed...). anyway one of my main reasons for buying this board other than intel hasn't got their act together with those stupid 810(decelerator) & 820 MB(castrated sdram solution), is the bonus of the asus via apollo 133a MBs come with APGx4 + all the other goodies. the only other way to get AGPx4 is thru that evil chipset maker with that non existant rdram rubbish (in this country anyway, australia if you want to know). i plugged all the stuff in and fiddled with the bios and found the magical AGP setting (x1, x2, x4)+ a side banding option. i set both x4 and sidebanding on. at 550 its ok for a while utill you start to tax it where it crashs or the screen corrupts on the win desktop. at 733 it doesn't take long for it burn. i guessed its either ram (pc100 however on this board you can set the system freq to +/- 33 on my system its 133FSB to reach 733 -33 so the ram runs at 100FSB), the board has issues suporting AGPx4 or the G400max cant handle x4 or the higher system freq.
if any one is running a similar system, have you got it to work, if so how or can anyone give me some tips in tne right direction concerning either my graphics card, MB etc.
overall i'm a bit worried because i bought this cpu & BM compo partly so i could run my G400max and x4.
system:
-p!!! 550e fc pga cpu with asus slot adapter
-asus p3v4x MB
-matrox g400max
-seagate barracuda ata66 7200rpm 28.5g hd
-pioneer 103s dvdrom 6x/32x
-castlewood orb 2.2g drv
-sb awe64 gold sound card
-smc ethernet adapter
-diamondview 1995 19" monitor
-ms keyboard
-ms intellimouse explorer

-win98se 4.10.2222 a
-pdesk 5.52.015
-asus mb bios rev 1.03, asus driver 4.17

any help would be much appreciated, cheers.

------------------

[EchoWars]

I am running a Max on a Tyan 1854 at 4x...no problems. Using latest 4.00 AGP driver from VIA tho...

If you are running Win98SE, DO NOT load the 4 in 1 pack, only the AGP driver. And I recommend the 4.00 version for stability.

[cancer]

cheers echowars
i'll give the driver thing a go however (i'll uninstall the other drivers)i thought the latest version of those drivers (4.20) caused some slowdowns especially in games. alot of people have said 4.17 driver are probably the best. is this what youa are talking about?

[RoGuE]

My P3V4X / PIII 650E / G400Max combo is operating in AGP 4x mode - no problems. I'm using the drivers on the supplied CD (4.17).

[EchoWars]

I think some have shown that the Asus runs fastest with the AGP driver supplied with the 4.17 package (it was version 3.59 AGP driver..??). My Tyan runs faster with the newest 4.00 driver. In any case, if you are crashing, speed is not an issue. Use the 4.00 driver and see what happens.

[paulcs]

I think you should stick with the 4.17 AGP driver and change your Matrox drivers. I know of no conflicts between the 4.17 AGP driver and the G400, and there is a known and serious issue with the P3V4X and VIA drivers released after the 4.17 set. However, we've seen quite a few issues with the PowerDesk 5.5X drivers and VIA chipsets in general. Try PD 5.41, and if that doesn't work, 5.30.

I think it's important to keep things in perspective here. Whatever benefits you get from AGP 4X (and there aren't any) will mostly likely be negated and then some if you install the AGP driver from the 4.20 set. A 20-50 FPS drop in Q3 performance is probably a symptom of a broader issue.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[cancer]

Cheers guys for the info, i'll take this into consideration while i'm trying to get my system stable.

[cancer]

just on a small side note, those of you with a similar system to me,
-P!!! 550e@733 fc pga on slot adapter
-asus p3v4x MB bios 1.03, 4 in 1 drivers v4.17
-matrox g400max 5.52.015
-(the rest is as above)
what kind of fps in BumpWater 1.0 do you get?
i get approx 53fps max(default window)everything turned on and little to no movement on screen. with me going nuts by dragging the light pole around the screen + dragging it thru the water i get 42 fps.

[paulcs]

Cancer, you may be having multiple issues, and I really think you should get your system stable with the CPU running at spec first. This will allow you to isolate potential driver issues from potential problems associated with overclocking your CPU.

What BIOS version are you using?

What CPU voltage are you using when you overclock?

Are you using the latest drivers for your soundcard? (I've seen issues with this board and old soundcard drivers.)

You're using both a fussy motherboard and a fussy videocard. I really think your first step is to clock down to 550 MHz, make sure you're using the latest BIOS (1003 was the last BIOS posted. You have a new revision of the board. I'm not sure what BIOS rev. 1.03 shipped with), and use the drivers that work best with your configuration.

Your motherboard is very different than the Tyan and just about every other VIA Apollo Pro 133A-based board available. Asus opted to go with an entirely different South Bridge and given the AGP issues with the board, one suspects they tinkered with the North Bridge configuration as well.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Rags]

Hi cancer,

I know I will probably get flamed for this, but if I were you I would take out the VIA board and stick your BH6 back in. The BH6 will run your coppermine just fine, my BH6 ran the 133 FSB coppermines with no trouble. I know you won't have AGP 4X, but AGP 2X on a BH6 is going to be faster than the VIA at 4X.

Rags



[This message has been edited by Rags (edited 27 March 2000).]

[cancer]

I'll attempt to answer questions from both paulcs & Rags

paulcs, when i started putting my system together, i purely ran at the standard clock, although (the problems)they aren't as frequent as they are now they still occurred. as to the sound card i'm running its an old isa sb awe 64gold (because no other card at the time had rca outs). last time i looked creative hadn't updated their drivers for this particular card for some time so i assumed it was a final release admittedly i haven't checked for awhile.
the asus mb came with bios 1.01 and have since flashed with 1.03
initially i went with the asus mb because of the sheer amount of options available although it wasn't the best o/clocking board(performance wise), it was the most stable. i took a gamble that they would address this in subsequent bios revisions especially the ioc (i think that was the acronym) which on some boards has a 1-4 setting, 4 being best performance, 1 the worst. i believe this is set to 1 on this board for stablity with no option to change (again hoping new bios fixes this issue)

Rags i expected to get done with that criticism especially in light of the review in toms hardware about bx board dumping on every new board so far. i didn't think my bios could get flashed to support the cumines(i think my board is a 1.01 hardware revision). i thought only the newer bh6 rev 1.02 boards could support the cumines. another reason i went with the asus mb is due to its enormous amount fsb setting, 32 in all. i wanted this so i could pop a good cooler on and clock over 133fsb & perhaps hit 150fsb if things didn't fall apart to badly before then. you are right though, abit boards are excellent and i wanted another one to support the new cumines but nothing fit the bill with agpx4. intel had the 810 which is rubbish and the 820 wasn't much better due to the rdram issue, course you could get the sdram adaptor....think not.
the only viable alternative was a via chipset which i had heard good things about that supported all the things i wanted. if abit had brought out a via 133a chipset mb, i would have it by now no questions asked.

again thanks for you time and assistance, with your help i hope to get things running smoothly.
cheers.

[cancer]

one last note to paulcs, i'm using 1.65vcore on the cpu via the socket adaptor jumpers.

[paulcs]

I've seen it run slower than a similarly configured BX-based system. Now, after two weeks of working on it, I actually have it running as fast or faster.

I've found the P3V4X to be a really fussy board, not only about drivers, but about hardware as well. It didn't like the UDMA 33 hard drive I was using, but it loves the ATA 66 drive I have in it now. (I know it isn't a good idea to run slower drives on the ATA 66 IDE channel, but I had to try.)

In terms of performance, and this is something LAMDTK reminds people about all the time, the quality and speed of your RAM can make all the difference in the world. Particularly, with this motherboard.

At first, I used two Siemens PC100 CAS2 128 MB DIMMs. They ran fine on a BX platform at 133 MHz (2-2-2), but I couldn't do the same on the Asus board. SiSoft Sandra's Memory Benchmark reported dismal scores when compared to the BX platform. When I replaced the PC100 RAM with a couple of CL2-rated PC133 DIMMs, memory performance went through the roof and exceeded the scores produced by the BX-based system.

3D scores are comparable. Quake3 benchmarks are a hair slower (about 1 frame per second) and everything else I tried is a bit faster.

I really don't think you're having an AGP 4x problem. I think you're having a driver compatibility issue and maybe some others. We know you are using Matrox drivers that often don't get along with VIA chipsets and drivers. We don't know what your IRQ situation is, what BIOS you're running, how your other other devices are getting along with the new chipset, etc.

I haven't tested the P3V4X with a Matrox board yet, so I can only get so specific. But I don't think you should be using the 5.52 drivers.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 27 March 2000).]

[paulcs]

We're posting at the same time.

I now think the P3V4X is the best overclocking board. Once you got it up and running properly, I think you find it's as fast as anything else, if not faster, and being able to run your AGP slot at spec while everything else is jacked-up to 133 MHz is a really big plus.

Again, I'm not using a Matrox board with this particular motherboard (I only have so many G400's lying around ), so there might be some G400-specific issues to consider.

As for the P3V4X, I've actually tried three different BIOS's, God knows how many BIOS settings, several VIA driver combinations, three different video drivers, two sets of soundcard drivers, *six* reinstalls of Windows 98, replaced the hard drive, and replaced the RAM. (God, I should get a life!)

Here's what I did to get the damn thing to work:

Checked BIOS settings. (The Matrox rules should remain the same with respect to AGP aperture, video shadowing and caching, etc. Set your memory timings apropriately and try selecting "auto" for the speed. Let the board figure it out and mess with it later if you feel the need.)

Reinstalled Windows.

Installed the video drivers that I noticed the board liked best.

Installed the 4.17 AGP driver.

Installed the 4.20 Busmaster, ACPI Registry, and IRQ Routing drivers (or whatever VIA is calling them these days). Some people have gotten good results by using the 4.17 drivers exclusively. I had *much* better results using the 4.17 AGP driver with the remaining 4.20 drivers. When installing the busmastering driver, I selected DMA support.

Installed updated soundcard drivers.

Of course, I kept tabs on things like IRQ's and non-VIA stuff that might go wrong.

You should only have devices that support UDMA 66 on the first IDE channel. Asus warns about this, and I found their advise to be accurate.

You might have to do some experimenting to get things running the way you want to. It seems people are arriving at different solutions to various problems.

Here are my specs:

PIII 600E @ 800 MHz (6x133)
PV34X Rev. 1.02, BIOS 1003
Guillemot TNT2 Ultra (3.77 Detonators, AGP 4x)
IBM 7200 RPM ATA 66 20.5 GB hard drive
256 MB Crucial PC133 CL2 RAM
Turtle Beach Montego II (White Box) soundcard
Adaptec SCSI board and a Plextor external CD-ROM

Good luck. I hope some of this helps.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[This message has been edited by paulcs (edited 27 March 2000).]

[cancer]

thanks paulcs
i'll give it a try as soon as i have a day to myself (maybe two!).
a couple of things though, i believe i have an earlier rev of the asus mb, i think its a 1.01, could this be an issue. also i'm running the latest Matrox bios revision (1.4 i think)
cheers.
(must sleep now, seeing spots....)