problem setting up a G400 on an Athlon

[Frankfurt]

This is just a link to the matrox tech support forum, seeing as the forum will be closed this weekend, if you could post your responses in this topic, i would appreciate it, as this is not entirely for myself, but for a friend of my brothers...
the link is: http://forum.matrox.com/mgaforum/For...ML/002267.html

Head over, read it, then come back here and tell me what you think i should do to correct the problem.
Thanks

Frankfurt

[aaroncgi]

Holy cow, this is exactly the same problem I just had with my Tyan S2380 KX133 when setting up my G400 32M DH. Unfortunately, I don't know that my 'fix' will solve your problem, because what I did was downgrade my bios from version 1.02A (came on the MB) to version 1.02, which Tyan says is much more stable with regards to AGP. It seemed no matter what setings I had in the BIOS, that system board extension for ACPI BIOS was hogging all the memory that the G400 wanted to use, as you said. Very frustrating! With the new MB BIOS, I have no conflicts.

On my Tyan, disabling ACPI did (and still) created even worse problems, I personally wouldn't have minded if they left all that ACPI crap completely out of the BIOS in the first place. I'm still tempted to resinstall Windows98 without support for ACPI, as another user suggested a couple days ago. I thought it was a particularly strange problem, I hope you can come up with a solution, good luck!

Aaron

[Frankfurt]

Thanks aaroncgi. Your suggestion led me to the Abit website where there was a NEW motherboard BIOS revision. I grabbed the file, and the update fixed the problems (the actual list of fixes was listed on their website, 1 of which was the fixing of the G400 incompatibility

I would like to suggest that you write to tyan and ask them to make a NEWER BIOS revision as it is obviously a problem with the revision you were using

Frankfurt

[aaroncgi]

Hey Frankfurt,

I just make go with your suggestion and write to Tyan. It's very confusing when the BIOS the boards are shipping with is Newer than the 'latest' on their web site, in fact it's not even listed except in a very brief mention, which says to go back! Weird..

Turns out though, that wasn't my only problem. I had to completely disable ACPI, not only on the jumper and in BIOS, but also when installing Windows98. (setup /p i) Works like a dream now!