A7N8XD Radeon problems

[Jules Augley]

I have had an A7N8X rev.1.06 for well over a year now. I have had a Sapphire
Atlantis Radeon 9700pro for the same amount of time. When I first put them
together, my processor was an Athlon XP 2400+ @ 133Mhz with Corsair
PC3200@200mhz. Any opengl games would randomly crash and lock up with all of
the ATI drivers I tried. I managed to solve this by setting AGP to 4X
instead of 8X. I was happy cos it worked like a dream. However, I have
recently upgraded to an Athlon XP 3200+ and the problem has returned, only
much worse. I have tried all sorts of things to fix it and the only thing
that seems to work is setting the AGP to OFF in smartgart! Anyway, I
suspected I had a faulty card so I bought a bog-standard 9600 to test
whether it was the 9700pro or something else. Lo and behold, the 9600 had
exactly the same symptoms, which leads me to suspect the motherboards
agp/ram settings not liking each other. I am at my wits end as I have tried
everything in my admittedly limited knowledge of pcs. I have included a
short list of the things I have tried below, so if anyone can help please
do! The next thing i am going to try is underclocking the CPU FSB and
playing with multiplier settings so that my money was not totally wasted on
the new CPU. I am considering replacing the motherboard as the cost of 2
motherboards is still cheaper than replacing the GFX card with a similar
performer, so anyone that has good news with Radeon 9700 pros and athlon
mobos please also post, if you can be arsed

Smartgart settings: Tried AGP8x, 4X and off. Disabled PCI and AGP Read and
write in advanced smartgart. Only settings that work are AGP off or agp read
and write off, however, performance in 3d games is abysmal, roughly 50%
worse than with AGP on (only to be expected I suppose). Set AGP frequency to
50mhz in BIOS, upped AGP voltage by 0.1v in BIOS

Memory:changed timings to cas 2.5 and back, reduced CPU/Memory interface to
optimal

Tried lowering video hardware acceleration in windows

forced 16-bit, 24-bit and disabled Z-buffer forcing

Disabled all non-vital devices that used an IRQ

Underclocked Radeon to well below even the non-pro settings

Thanks for reading this.

Jules

 

[dino]

when you overclocked the board..I hope you locked the AGP freq. at 66
mhz..and set the ram to 100%..I know my OC'd A7N8X-Deluxe Rev 2 is rock
steady....but I also read that rev 1 does not fully support 200FSB so maybe
that is the issue.

 

[Jules Augley]

Thanks for the reply. The board is not overclocked it is a new processor. I
tried turning the ram freqency down to 166mhz and it looks like it MAY have
solved the problem. Why it works I dont know, possibly because the rev 1s
originally only supported 166mhz fsb and ram. Hopefully I can find out
sometime soon.

 

[Kyle Brant]

Have you tested your systems stability by using memtest86
(www.memtest86.com) or prime95? If the board is not rated for 200MHz
fsb, I would test the heck out of it b4 proceeding with daily use at
an overclocked level.

--
Best regards,
Kyle
| Thanks for the reply. The board is not overclocked it is a new
processor. I
| tried turning the ram freqency down to 166mhz and it looks like it
MAY have
| solved the problem. Why it works I dont know, possibly because the
rev 1s
| originally only supported 166mhz fsb and ram. Hopefully I can find
out
| sometime soon.
| | > when you overclocked the board..I hope you locked the AGP freq. at
66
| > mhz..and set the ram to 100%..I know my OC'd A7N8X-Deluxe Rev 2 is
rock
| > steady....but I also read that rev 1 does not fully support 200FSB
so
| maybe
| > that is the issue.
| >
| >
|
|

 

[Ben Pope]

I have had an A7N8X rev.1.06 for well over a year now. I have had a
Sapphire Atlantis Radeon 9700pro for the same amount of time. When I
first put them together, my processor was an Athlon XP 2400+ @ 133Mhz
with Corsair PC3200@200mhz. Any opengl games would randomly crash and
lock up with all of the ATI drivers I tried. I managed to solve this by
setting AGP to 4X instead of 8X. I was happy cos it worked like a dream.
However, I have recently upgraded to an Athlon XP 3200+ and the problem
has returned, only much worse. I have tried all sorts of things to fix it
and the only thing that seems to work is setting the AGP to OFF in
smartgart! Anyway, I suspected I had a faulty card so I bought a

Reinstall the nForce 3.13 - I suspect your AGP driver is screwed.

Additionally you have 1.06 board, you SHOULD be able to get 200MHz FSB with
a late BIOS, but you may have much better luck with say, 190MHz.

Ben