g400 and Gigabyte 71xe

[Stevie7]

I have installed a g400, 32meg DH on my Gigabyte GA71xe motherboard with 128 megs of ram. It has an athlon 750 on it.

Initially, I had problems running some applications such as fs2000, when looking out the windows the program would freeze. I have installed all the amd and matrox drivers and patches, but still cannot get th board to work correctly. The board shares IRQ 9 with pci steering, but this is not supposed to be a problem. The pci slot below the agp slot is not occupied.

When testing the board with dxdiag, agp support is grayed out, and the test for direct 3d hangs up. the matrox quickdesk diagnostics utility shows that busmastering is not available, even though I attempt to force it on with the mtsu program.

Anyone have any good ideas?

Thanks

[Wombat]

I looked, and this motherboard runs AMD chips, so no VIA patches for you (my first guess).

What operating system are you running? Do you have "Enable IRQ for VGA" set to ON in your BIOS?

[Stevie7]

Thanks for the quick response. I am running windows 98 with the updates that are available at the microsoft site. I have installed the amd updated drivers, including the miniagp port drivers.

The enable irq for vga that you referred to is something I cannot find in my bios setup (amd version 1.21 as I recall).

[Wombat]

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/support/mbbios_index.htm

This is the website for your MB's BIOS. Are you running the latest BIOS (appears to be F7 for the 71xe boards)?

[Stevie7]

I downloaded the latest Gigabyte bios and ran the flash program--which doesn't give any feedback as to correct installation--so that is taken care of. This did not make any difference. I still get the bus mastering not available error message under quickdesk diagnostics, the direct3d test in dxdiag leads to a white screen and program hangup, and dxdiag shows that agp is not supported, although it does show direct3d as enabled.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

[Greebe]

Was this a new install of hardware ie fresh built system or was there another card prior?

[Stevie7]

There was a diamond stealth pci card there before.

[Greebe]

Sounds to me like you have references of those drivers on your system still. They need to be removed prior to installing anew.

Diamond makes the worst crap and has always been shitty about drivers and their removal.
I don't have the specific on how to with what you have, but I'm sure somone else here can help in that catagory.