VIA Apollo Pro 133A and G400 drivers: Experiences

[isochar]

I personally will only go with an Intel/AMD (and soon Micron) chipset. The Taiwanese seem to create chipsets with as much reliability as their cars.

For example, the pro133a can't run AGP 4x, and it's ATA66 performance is at ATA33 levels. (Every site I've seen that tests ATA66 performance of hard drives uses the 810 chipset)

[This message has been edited by isochar (edited 21 April 2000).]

[antagonistix]

Icestorm - and you others who are having grief - youare not alone !!!!!!!

I purchased a P3V4X with 256mb 133 RAM last weekend, and have had living nightmares since.

Put it this way, before, I had an ASUS P2B board and couldnt overclock my P3600 (Katmai) to more than 617 - hence the new board since it allows voltage raising.

This is what Ive found with the 4.17 AGP drivers and 5.52 PD for my G400.
No OpenGL games work stable if the graphics aperture size is less than 256mb - also TurboGL WILL NOT WORK with this combination of drivers.
Uninstalling the drivers too many times prevents system shutdowns and gives you the BSOD as someone else has pointed out.

The pain in the arse really is that although I am now running my P3600 at 690, Quake 3 Benchmarks are STILL SLOWER then I had before. (85 FPS in fastest mode as opposed to 105FPS with the P2B)

D3D however, is faster with this driver combo if the graphics aperture size is set to 64mb.

If someone knows how to cure any of these problems for sure - please let me know.
Im gonna try the 4.19 drivers one ofthe guys has posted alinkto and I dont really want to have to go back to 5.3PD.

MATROX PLEASE RELEASE DRIVERS THAT ARE MORE COMPATIBLE WITH VIA !!!!!!!

[antagonistix]

By the Way, one more thing.
For GAVIN -

I have NO problemswith this board whatsoever in Windows 2000,only win98.

D3D flies - 3dMark2000 gives me a score of 3391 and I can get 89FPS in Quake3 set on
Fastest mode.

Now considering there is a HAL inbetween the OS and the hardware, and that the Kernel is more priviliged in Win2k, thats pretty good.

No lockups,no hanging and AGP aperture size doesnt screw up OGL - ofcourse turboGL wont work in win2k - but it wasnt designed to.

[Marz]

IceStorm: The SoF problem (crashing to the desktop between levels, etc, etc) is a Raven/Activision issue, a known issue, especially with the G400. The thing is they don't seem to care too much about fixing it!! Also, I'm running the P3V4X and a lot of the OGL problems I had (apart from SoF) were fixed by using GLSetup. Don't ask, I don't know why or what the difference is between GLSetup and TurboGL but it did stop games crashing, (except for SoF)... And as far as OC'ing, I'm running a P3 600E @ 876, using a Tennmax cooler. Another thing that helps is really good memory, I've had no problems booting at 900Mhz into Win98 (games crash mainly due to overheating of the CPU and I personally don't like to run my CPU hot) using Enhanced Memory Systems HSDRAM. Drivers, well, the most stable setup that is being used around the traps here in Australia is the VIA 4.17, Matrox 5.52 and the latest of whatever sound card you have (I'm using an Aureal SQ2500), works for most of us. Also if you want more info and some tech help try the P3V4X forum at www.overclockers.com.au (it's down at the moment, yer I know pretty useless) or try here www.netspace.net.au/~jesse/p3v4x/main.html.
HTH

Marz

[paulcs]

Marz, after a cold boot, will the 64 MB Texture Rendering test run in 3DMark 2000 on your setup?

Have you had peformance problems with the AGP aperture opened to 256 MB?

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[IceStorm]

Marz:

SoF's fine, as long as I use the ICD. I'm aware it doesn't work with TGL. I'm also aware that every ICD I've used looks like crap compared to the TurboGL (more later). I'm aware of the crashing issues, however, I was bombing out on more than just the first couple of levels. No biggie, as it autosaved just before crashing out. SoF also seems to know when you have a secondary card in the system, even when it's disabled after boot. That is what was causing SoF to bomb on startup for me earlier. Disabling then rebooting worked fine.

If your FSB is at 146, your AGP is at 73, well within what I found the limits of AGP on this board are. I'm going to suspect that the reason I can't go over 750 reliably is because I have a full compliment of RAM. Four unregistered DIMMS at 18 chips per DIMM puts the maximum load on the RAM bus that's permitted by spec, and that's a spec that VIA won't even officially acknowledge, as they recommend three DIMMs only. I'm not using buffered DRAM (registered), so that's probably part of my problem. That's fine, 733 to 750's just fine with me. It still doesn't excuse the abysimal driver compatibility and performance issues that this board has (and I'm not saying this is a Matrox issue, but it is one that exists).

The ICD, based on what I've seen in Half-Life and Soldier of Fortune, is NOT a great gaming solution. I'm sorry, but I find those brightened edges unacceptable, especially when the edge is supposed to be a flush surface in the center of a door, and instead I get a brightened diagonal line. Guess what, the TurboGL doesn't have these problems! There's an obvious difference between the two GL rendering systems, and TurboGL just does it better, hands down.

Unresolved issues

The problem, as I see it, are threefold:

First, the AGP drivers that VIA makes are less than optimal.

Second, the implementation of the P3V4X is less than optimal, from a performance standpoint. Asus seems to be taking steps to correct this.

Third, Matrox's drivers, since 5.41, it seems, do not allow operation of the TurboGL on a board that is equiped with a VIA AGP chipset. This is the least acceptable, since Matrox has well and truly had plenty of time to fix these problem, and they're fully aware that a miniGL is a valuable addition to any system that's multiheaded under Win98/98SE.

Misc.

antagonistix: The Katmai core is well know to NOT exceed much more than 600 Mhz. It's an issue with the quality of the silicon used (and the cache chip speed), and not the voltage. Great that you got it to 690Mhz, but you're the exception to the rule.

paulcs: Warm boot, soft boot, shit boot, reboot - nothing got my AGP texture over 48MB when my apeture was set to 256MB in the BIOS (I read your thread). I can get it to 96MB if I go to a 128MB apeture, but then the system doesn't boot half the time.

----

I sincerly hope Matrox and VIA work together to fix the remaining issues between VIA's AGP implementation and Matrox's drivers. Like it or not, there is only one decent 133FSB solution, and it's VIA's. i820 is a lame duck, i840's out of reach of most of us, and 440BX, OCed, has RAM subsystem load problems.

It's VIA or bust until i815, and i815 is not being pushed by Intel (they can't - contractual obligations to Rambus corp).

Matrox, wake up and smell the coffee - you're shooting yourselves in the foot by not fixing these outstanding issues.

[antagonistix]

ICE,

Yeah, I guess I was lucky to get above 617, which was the limit prior to raising the voltage to 2.3 volts. And to be honest the speed increase is welcome to any G400 based boards which eat cpu's for breakfast. So All my benchmarks in D3D have significantly increased - however Im with you in being angry with matrox for not sorting out the TurboGL to be more compatible with VIA AGP.

One question - Why is D3D much faster with the AGP aperture set to 64MB, whilst Quake3 wont run unless its set to 256 ?????

KRUZIN - ANT - for gods sakes help us get the message thru to Matrox. If it werent for the Image quality beating the hell out of any competition, Id go out and buy the GEForce. (sod the V5 now that Ive read the previews)

[IceStorm]

I just ordered twin 256MB PC133 ECC DIMMs (32x72 density). If they work with the P3B-F properly at 133FSB, I'll be back in a 440BX solution come the weekend. :-)

Oh, and guess which mobo Anand couldn't get working with his preview V5-5500 - the P3V4X. VIA SUCKS! :-)

[This message has been edited by IceStorm (edited 25 April 2000).]

[Wombat]

Err, 3Dfx isn't exactly known for wonderful drivers. Don't speak until you know whose fault it was.

[IceStorm]

Heh. And the Matrox drivers are that much better? You did read all I have written above, right? I don't have these problems with the 440BX or the AMD chipset

Two companies may be wrong about how they go about their driver releases, but they do show that the standard is STILL the 440BX. I'm going to attempt returning to that standard, as I'm tired of all the BS.

If it doesn't pan out, or the P3V4X works fine with the V5-6000, well then, I'll potentially have 768MB of RAM in my main box. I make out either way. :-)

[antagonistix]

ICE,

Its too late for me to return to my ASUS P2B, I gave it to a friend.
One thing tho, this P3V4X might still come in handy if I decide to buy a coppermine, which I may well do to see if I can get 1Ghz out of this thing. Im still confident Matrox will sort out their drivers, I dont think its ASUS's fault.

As for 3dfx, personally, I couldnt step that far backwards in image quality. Sharkyextreme quoted that in Quake 3 it was worse than a GeForce - which is way behind matrox in image quality. I cant go back to looking at washed out colours anymore - hell even in 16Bit my G400 looks better than a TNT2 in 32bit. (Im not talking bump mapping)
FSAA is only good for flight sims and takes way too much a performance hit so forget that as well.

Good luck whichever way you go

[Marz]

Paulcs: I'm not much on running benchmarks so, I can't help you with the 3DMark info although, I have noticed this. If I run SoF (using GLSetup's drivers) I have to have the AGP Apature at 256Mb. If I try to run UT (D3D) while the AGP Apature is at 256Mb I get a real bad flickering and eventually the my system locks up and visa versa if the AGP Apature is set to 64Mb.

Also, a little update on SoF. I've found that if I use the GLSetup drivers, install them twice! Again dunno why but it seems to solve a lot of the problems with regard to dropping back to the desktop between levels.

IceStorm: Yes, I'd have to agree with you on the driver issue's although, most of the companies you mentioned (VIA, Matrox, 3dfx, et-al) are pretty much the same when it comes to solving an issue with video, motherboard, etc, etc...

I reckon the major manufacturers have thier own secret forum somewhere and they sit on it bitching and blaming one and other. That's why (well I reckon anyway, hehehe) it takes so long for any one of them to push out patches/fixes for the problems us paying customers have!!

[Whisper]

What are you doing here IceStorm?

And stop overclocking, that will fix your problem!

[This message has been edited by Whisper (edited 27 April 2000).]

[IceStorm]

None of my testing was done OCed. It was ALL done at stock speeds. The only tweak was the VIO being set to 3.65 instead of 3.5 .

I've had a Matrox card for almost two years now (several, actually). I found this place when I bought my G200 in 1998 (don't let the registration date fool you. I believe the forum burped a while back).

[This message has been edited by IceStorm (edited 27 April 2000).]