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G400 Wierdness in HL
Hi, I've been battling with my G400 for awhile now. A little background, I built this sytstem about a month ago,
Originally, I installed windows NT and 98 (dual boot). Under 98 and NT, the graphics got corrupted (rainbow colors and system freeze, sounds like the plaid screen of death I've heard mentioned). Occasionally just doing "normal" windows tasks, using netscape or IE. The only time I could reproducably get it to freeze was by trying to go into halflife. The menus were fine, but as soon as I went into the game, it would freeze. In openGL mode, it would plaid-screen and freeze, in DirectX, it would just freeze, but no screen corruption.
So I re-installed 98 and NT. This time, everything worked fine. I had it this way for a month, no errors at all, running HL in OGL mode looked great. I had 98 and NT on the same partition though, and I decided I didn't want to do that. So I repartioned and re-installed. No hardware changes, just like there were no hardware changes between the non-working and working installs before. The errors came back. Exactly as before.
Under 98, the g400 was sharing an IRQ with the USB controller, so I disabled the USB IRQ in the bios. Now it's got an IRQ all by itself (except IRQ holder for PCI Steering). Same freezes. Looking at the the Motherboard manual, it looks like it SHOULD have it's own bus master signal. PCI slot 1 shares a signal with the AGP card, PCI slot 3 with the ATA/66 IDE controller. Neither are in use. The 3com NIC is in slot 2.
At any rate, I disabled Bus Mastering, and DirectX mode of HL works. Performance is less than stellar though, obviously. OGL mode crashes out to the desktop with an invalid instruction in kernel32.
I disabled my com and parallel ports, just to free up IRQ's since I wasn't using them anyway. Here are my IRQ assignments:
The corruption occured in NT and in 98, under 5.30 and 5.41 in 98, and 4.34 in NT, which struck me as odd. Exact same plaid corruption in both. I know heat isn't an issue, it's downright chilly in the case.
(maybe not, but none (cpu, g400, motherboard chipset) of the chips get very warm at all.) And then it worked before the current re-install. (For 3 weeks or so. Plenty of long hours spent playing Halflife)
I've tried many of the things mentioned in the forums here, varying color depths and resolutions. No luck until I disabled bus mastering (which is not a solution). I've been talking to Matrox tech support; I heard back within a day the first time I contacted them, was asked to mail some more info (IRQ's, etc), and never heard back. (2 weeks later). Any assistance would be GREATLY appreciated. I like the features of this card alot, and part of the reason I went with it was because I've had good luck with matrox in the past (i've got a 4MB Mystique PCI in my previous main computer). Plus the xwindows support is pretty good. Thanks for reading this rather long post.
-zaius
- G400 32MB DH (non-max)
- Powerdesk 5.41.008 (Though I've tried 5.3x as well)
- Abit BP6 with dual celeron 366's. (now overclocked to 550, but the problems with the G400 occured before I overclocked it)
- AWE64 Gold
- 3com 3c5905b PCI 10/100 NIC
- Western Digital 13 gig Expert drive (7200 RPM)
- Pioneer DVD-104 DVD Drive
- Lots 'o fans. (a global win FEP-32 heatsink/fan combo on each chip, 2 80cm case fans, 3 fan hard drive cooler)
Originally, I installed windows NT and 98 (dual boot). Under 98 and NT, the graphics got corrupted (rainbow colors and system freeze, sounds like the plaid screen of death I've heard mentioned). Occasionally just doing "normal" windows tasks, using netscape or IE. The only time I could reproducably get it to freeze was by trying to go into halflife. The menus were fine, but as soon as I went into the game, it would freeze. In openGL mode, it would plaid-screen and freeze, in DirectX, it would just freeze, but no screen corruption.
So I re-installed 98 and NT. This time, everything worked fine. I had it this way for a month, no errors at all, running HL in OGL mode looked great. I had 98 and NT on the same partition though, and I decided I didn't want to do that. So I repartioned and re-installed. No hardware changes, just like there were no hardware changes between the non-working and working installs before. The errors came back. Exactly as before.
Under 98, the g400 was sharing an IRQ with the USB controller, so I disabled the USB IRQ in the bios. Now it's got an IRQ all by itself (except IRQ holder for PCI Steering). Same freezes. Looking at the the Motherboard manual, it looks like it SHOULD have it's own bus master signal. PCI slot 1 shares a signal with the AGP card, PCI slot 3 with the ATA/66 IDE controller. Neither are in use. The 3com NIC is in slot 2.
At any rate, I disabled Bus Mastering, and DirectX mode of HL works. Performance is less than stellar though, obviously. OGL mode crashes out to the desktop with an invalid instruction in kernel32.
I disabled my com and parallel ports, just to free up IRQ's since I wasn't using them anyway. Here are my IRQ assignments:
- 0 System timer
- 1 Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural Keyboard
- 2 Programmable interrupt controller
- 4 Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller
- 4 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering
- 5 Creative AWE64 Gold 16-bit Audio (SB16 compatible)
- 6 Standard Floppy Disk Controller
- 7 Matrox Millennium G400 DualHead - English
- 7 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering
- 8 System CMOS/real time clock
- 10 3Com Fast EtherLink XL 10/100Mb TX Ethernet NIC (3C905B-TX)
- 10 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering
- 11 HPT366 Ultra DMA Controller
- 11 HPT366 Ultra DMA Controller
- 11 IRQ Holder for PCI Steering
- 12 PS/2 Compatible Mouse Port
- 13 Numeric data processor
- 14 Primary IDE controller (dual fifo)
- 14 Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
- 15 Secondary IDE controller (dual fifo)
- 15 Intel 82371AB/EB PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
- 3 (free)
- 9 (free)
The corruption occured in NT and in 98, under 5.30 and 5.41 in 98, and 4.34 in NT, which struck me as odd. Exact same plaid corruption in both. I know heat isn't an issue, it's downright chilly in the case.
(maybe not, but none (cpu, g400, motherboard chipset) of the chips get very warm at all.) And then it worked before the current re-install. (For 3 weeks or so. Plenty of long hours spent playing Halflife)I've tried many of the things mentioned in the forums here, varying color depths and resolutions. No luck until I disabled bus mastering (which is not a solution). I've been talking to Matrox tech support; I heard back within a day the first time I contacted them, was asked to mail some more info (IRQ's, etc), and never heard back. (2 weeks later). Any assistance would be GREATLY appreciated. I like the features of this card alot, and part of the reason I went with it was because I've had good luck with matrox in the past (i've got a 4MB Mystique PCI in my previous main computer). Plus the xwindows support is pretty good. Thanks for reading this rather long post.
-zaius
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