Connect3d Radeon 9600

[Gary Davies]

Motherboard: ASUS A7V8X
Processor: Athlon XP 2200+
OS's: Win98se and XP

I'm having a bit of a problem with this card, it is correctly installed in
the AGP slot, on power up, the boot-up information and BIOS are correctly
visible, booting to Windows (either OS) detects the card and attempts to
install a standard VGA driver, cancelling this and then installing the
proper Radeon driver comes back with a message saying the driver couldn't be
installed and I should try installing the standard VGA driver first,
attempting to do this locks the machine or complains of a conflict and
fails, no conflicts are reported in device manager or system information,
the PC can happily be left in this VGA mode indefinitely. On reboot the
display is normally blank, cutting power to the machine for a short period
doesn't restore the display, switching off and waiting 10-15 minutes
normally restores the screen (?!). I have noticed this blanking also
sometimes happens rebooting before the OS has started booting. My initial
feeling is this was a conflict with existing hardware, so have removed all
existing PCI cards and disabled all unnecessary hardware in the BIOS, this
makes no difference. I've removed and re-seated the card several times with
no change. Whatever the problem is, it doesn't seem to be a driver problem
since I haven't even managed to install the drivers, certainly a strange
problem.

I would appreciate any suggestions.
Regards,
Gary

 

[Sharp]

Motherboard: ASUS A7V8X
Processor: Athlon XP 2200+
OS's: Win98se and XP

I'm having a bit of a problem with this card, it is correctly installed in
the AGP slot, on power up, the boot-up information and BIOS are correctly
visible, booting to Windows (either OS) detects the card and attempts to
install a standard VGA driver, cancelling this and then installing the
proper Radeon driver comes back with a message saying the driver couldn't be
installed and I should try installing the standard VGA driver first,
attempting to do this locks the machine or complains of a conflict and
fails, no conflicts are reported in device manager or system information,
the PC can happily be left in this VGA mode indefinitely. On reboot the
display is normally blank, cutting power to the machine for a short period
doesn't restore the display, switching off and waiting 10-15 minutes
normally restores the screen (?!). I have noticed this blanking also
sometimes happens rebooting before the OS has started booting. My initial
feeling is this was a conflict with existing hardware, so have removed all
existing PCI cards and disabled all unnecessary hardware in the BIOS, this
makes no difference. I've removed and re-seated the card several times with
no change. Whatever the problem is, it doesn't seem to be a driver problem
since I haven't even managed to install the drivers, certainly a strange
problem.

I would appreciate any suggestions.
Regards,
Gary

Check BIOS concerning video card settings.

Regards
Michael

 

[Gary Davies]

couldn't

Check BIOS concerning video card settings.

Regards
Michael

Thanks for the reply, anything in particular? from memory I think the AGP
aperture is set at 128mb's, it's a 256mb card so should this be 256 too? the
AGP capability the default 8X, AGP voltage is Auto, AGP performance control
is disabled, AGP fast write is disabled, Video memory cache mode is UC
(uncachable), can't think of any others, any of these obviously wrong?

Thanks!

 

[vellu]

Thanks for the reply, anything in particular? from memory I think the AGP
aperture is set at 128mb's, it's a 256mb card so should this be 256 too? the
AGP capability the default 8X, AGP voltage is Auto, AGP performance control
is disabled, AGP fast write is disabled, Video memory cache mode is UC
(uncachable), can't think of any others, any of these obviously wrong?

Thanks!

As far as BIOS settings go, your settings seem ok. Aperture size: the
more memory the card has, the less aperture is needed. For 256MB card
128 or 256 will do (very little, if any, affect on performance).

But have you installed chipset drivers (which include AGP drivers)? VIA
4in1 for VIA mobos, Intel drivers for Intel mobos, etc.

 

[Gary Davies]

As far as BIOS settings go, your settings seem ok. Aperture size: the
more memory the card has, the less aperture is needed. For 256MB card
128 or 256 will do (very little, if any, affect on performance).

But have you installed chipset drivers (which include AGP drivers)? VIA
4in1 for VIA mobos, Intel drivers for Intel mobos, etc.

Good, glad to hear that.

Yep, drivers all installed. This blank screen business though has occured
without even booting into the OS, e.g. boot to the XP boot menu a few times
and it will eventually go blank after a reboot, so at this point it
shouldn't have loaded any drivers. What is extremely weird is how once it
does it's blank screen thing, no amount of powering off/on seems to fix it,
but leaving it off for a period of time seems to fix it, i've never had
anything like that before?

 

[Gary]

too?

Good, glad to hear that.

Yep, drivers all installed. This blank screen business though has occured
without even booting into the OS, e.g. boot to the XP boot menu a few times
and it will eventually go blank after a reboot, so at this point it
shouldn't have loaded any drivers. What is extremely weird is how once it
does it's blank screen thing, no amount of powering off/on seems to fix it,
but leaving it off for a period of time seems to fix it, i've never had
anything like that before?

This might be a dumb question but... On the back of the Radeon box it says
it's compatible with AGP 4X (1.5V) and 8X (0.8V), my BIOS seems to be locked
at 8X, the other options for AGP voltage apart from "Auto" are 1.5v-1.8v, so
i'm assuming the BIOS is using 8X with 1.5v? is this correct?

 

[Gary Davies]

This might be a dumb question but... On the back of the Radeon box it says
it's compatible with AGP 4X (1.5V) and 8X (0.8V), my BIOS seems to be locked
at 8X, the other options for AGP voltage apart from "Auto" are 1.5v-1.8v, so
i'm assuming the BIOS is using 8X with 1.5v? is this correct?

For anyone who blazes this trail after me, after several hours of fiddling I
decided to manually set the AGP voltage in the BIOS, I tried 1.5v but as
expected this did exactly the same, next I tried 1.6v and i'm extremely
happy to report this fixed the screen blanking problem.

The drivers then correctly installed onto XP and seemed to work fine, 98 was
an entirely different story though, to cut a long story short the current
Connect3D CD only contains drivers for XP/2000 even though it appears to try
to install 98 drivers it will always say Setup was unable to setup... To
resolve this you need to download 98 compatible drivers from their web site.

Thanks to everyone!