g400 lockups and trouble....

[paulcs]

If you're getting a new case, make sure your Dell motherboard is compatible. I know they used to have Intel make these proprietary boards with cable connectors that only worked with Dell cases. I learned this the hard way a couple of years ago when trying to upgrade the motherboard in a Dell system.

Hopefully, others will chime in tomorrow, but I don't see anything that stands out in your IRQ list other than that CS4236B business. Whatever it is, it's a real resource hog.

I really suspect your power supply. 235 Watts is pushing it on a loaded PIII system with a new videocard. 200 Watts sounds really inadequate.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[dmerola]

On my pc I have the same problem of lockup with G400 16MB single head :-( . In Windows the scrren is corrupted after some minutes and after locks, in 3D the sysytem locks in the same moment the game start. I noticed that the problem on my mobo (ASUS P2B-F) is the bus at 66MHz. I tried with different Celeron and PII and system lockup with bus at 66MHz expecially in 3D. With bus at 75 the problem appear only someway. With the bus at 100MHz all is ok. Hy guys
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Daniele Merola, Redattore di Hardware Inside:
Sito: http://www.gamersrevolt.com/hwinside/
E-Mail: hwinside@gamersrevolt.com
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[paulcs]

Dmerola, I'm just guessing, but given the closer you get to 100 MHz, the better your results, I'm suspecting your AGP jumper is set to 2/3 and remains at 2/3 when you switch bus speeds.

Set your AGP jumper to 1/1 when your front side bus is running at 66 MHz. Keep it at 2/3 when it's running at 100 MHz.

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[jtracy]

I have been having problems as well. Ever since I got the card about 3 months ago, I've been having problems i all OpenGL games, as well as the Matrox tech demo and System Shock 2. Direct3D usually works fine, however.

The main difference here is that I notice no system lockups (though ss2 did that once). What happens for me is that the program crashed and I'm kicked back to a 640x480 Windows desktop. It usually happens as soon as it's done loading a second level into memory, right before I get to play.

I've tried EVERYTHING, and Matrox tech support seems to have no idea what to do. Why the **** did I buy from Matrox? It was well known that they didn't know shit about making drivers. It certainly won't happen again.

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My hardware:

Matrox Millenium G400 16mb
Asus P5a-b super socket7 motherboard
K6-2 400mhz processor
128mb pc-100 SDRAM

My software:

Matrox bios version 1.5
Matrox drivers 5.3
TurboGL 1.0
Motherboard bios version 1009b1
Directx version 7a
Windows version 98SE

[Kristian]

FFVIIGuy and PaulC

That CS4236B is a "Crystal Sound" chip, It's a common crap-ass soundchip that is included on some motherboards. Check your systemsettings for it and disable it, perhaps it's already software disabled but is still hogging IRQ's. Search the BIOS if it can be deactivated there.

Regards

Kristian

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Striving for perfection

[derah]

3 com!!!!! I just went on-line with @Home cable. Within 30 minutes of installation my system started throwing out blue screens of death and after 5 days of troubleshooting, booted up to a desk top with "16 colours" not even high colour and then went permanantly black. They installed a clone of the 3 com ethernet card and with SOHO software. The computer won't even stay booted up. Thank you all for the hint about 3com. I'll be investigating further.

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ASUS P3BF 440BX MB,Intel PIII 500 Mhz, 128MB RAM,Fujitsu 13 GB HD, Acer 50X CDROM, Matrox G400 Max (ver 5.41/turbo), SB Live MP3+(ver 4.06.711) sound card with Liveware3.0, DX7.0