A7N8X-VM video woes!

[Jorge E. Ravelo]

I built a PC for the office (no gaming) with a new core AMD Athlon XP
2200+/ASUS A7N8X-VM/512 MB PNY RAM (not the high end version) running WinXP
Pro. The on board IGP video is used.
IT ran very well, but when I loaded the ASUS drivers I got a 2cm line
across the mouse pointer, and lots of (artifact) lines across window panes.
The more of these the more unstable the PC became, spontaneously rebooting.
Since the Power Supply only had 15Amps on the 12V lead I put a 430 watt
model with 20A on the lead, but nothing changed. The problems went away when
I switched off most of the hardware acceleration (the slider in
Settings/Advanced/ Troubleshooting) in Display Settings.
It runs well now, but no direct 3D!
I looked it up in Google, and it seems that the GF4MX IGP is very touchy and
most guys end up placing an AGP card to solve the problem.
Is anyone running low CAS RAM with the IGP and not getting the artifacts? I
know you can't use DDR400 with the IGP, but would a higher performance RAM
help?
I think I am just going to place an old reliable Hercules GF2MX Agp card in
there that I have laying around and forgetting about it!

Jorge

 

[Jacek Aleksandrowicz]

I built a PC for the office (no gaming) with a new core AMD Athlon XP
2200+/ASUS A7N8X-VM/512 MB PNY RAM (not the high end version) running WinXP
Pro. The on board IGP video is used.
IT ran very well, but when I loaded the ASUS drivers I got a 2cm line
across the mouse pointer, and lots of (artifact) lines across window panes.
The more of these the more unstable the PC became, spontaneously rebooting.
Since the Power Supply only had 15Amps on the 12V lead I put a 430 watt
model with 20A on the lead, but nothing changed. The problems went away when
I switched off most of the hardware acceleration (the slider in
Settings/Advanced/ Troubleshooting) in Display Settings.
It runs well now, but no direct 3D!
I looked it up in Google, and it seems that the GF4MX IGP is very touchy and
most guys end up placing an AGP card to solve the problem.
Is anyone running low CAS RAM with the IGP and not getting the artifacts? I
know you can't use DDR400 with the IGP, but would a higher performance RAM
help?
I think I am just going to place an old reliable Hercules GF2MX Agp card in
there that I have laying around and forgetting about it!

Jorge

Have you installed WinXP Sp1 ? if not do so. This should solve the
problem.

J.A.

 

[Paul]

I built a PC for the office (no gaming) with a new core AMD Athlon XP
2200+/ASUS A7N8X-VM/512 MB PNY RAM (not the high end version) running WinXP
Pro. The on board IGP video is used.
IT ran very well, but when I loaded the ASUS drivers I got a 2cm line
across the mouse pointer, and lots of (artifact) lines across window panes.
The more of these the more unstable the PC became, spontaneously rebooting.
Since the Power Supply only had 15Amps on the 12V lead I put a 430 watt
model with 20A on the lead, but nothing changed. The problems went away when
I switched off most of the hardware acceleration (the slider in
Settings/Advanced/ Troubleshooting) in Display Settings.
It runs well now, but no direct 3D!
I looked it up in Google, and it seems that the GF4MX IGP is very touchy and
most guys end up placing an AGP card to solve the problem.
Is anyone running low CAS RAM with the IGP and not getting the artifacts? I
know you can't use DDR400 with the IGP, but would a higher performance RAM
help?
I think I am just going to place an old reliable Hercules GF2MX Agp card in
there that I have laying around and forgetting about it!

Jorge

If you do a search on abxzone.com, your analysis is basically correct.
There seems to be an issue with the onboard video and system memory.
(Even the downloadable A7N8X/VM manual says you can only use PC3200
memory, while using an AGP video card.) It could be that low CAS
ram aggravates the situation.

http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=575399#post575399
http://www.abxzone.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=568777#post568777

Since the BIOS has no memory adjustment options, there is no opportunity
to manually set up the memory. I would find one of the enumeration
utilities like AIDA32 or CPUZ, to list the settings being used on
the motherboard, to see if the memory is not being set up properly
by the BIOS. It may be, that the only way to tweak the memory, is
to use memory sticks where the SPD is using less aggressive settings.
For example, if you bought some CAS3 memory, maybe if the BIOS grabs
the default CAS3 number from the SPD, the motherboard will be more
stable than if a CAS2 DIMM was used.

Another possibility, is that the Vdimm is on the low side, but
that voltage generally isn't shown in any motherboard hardware monitor,
so again, it will be hard to verify unless you own a multimeter and
know where to probe.

This difference between the DIMM spec for operating with or without
a video card, is even on this MSI page, implying there is a known
design issue:

http://www.msicomputer.com/product/detail_spec/product_detail.asp?model=K7N2GM-L

HTH,
Paul