I have a P4 2.66GHz on a P4S5A/DX+ mobo. 2GB PC4000 DDR Ram. Running
XP Home SP2. I currently have a nVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 graphics card.
I currently can not use the card due to every time I enable it my
screen blanks out and I have to reboot in safe mode to disable it.
This has been an on going problem that no forum has helped me solve.
I'm hoping its just the card and not my AGP slot. I am looking to
upgrade to whatever my current mobo and cpu can handle. Is PCI aor AGP
better? Since I've been having problems with my current card and it's
AGP I would think PCI would be the way to go. Everything I look at
online tells me to go with a PCIe. Since my mobo does not have that
slot I can't seem to find the right information. You help would be
greatly appreciated.
I take it, your video card displays the BIOS, it displays while
Windows is loading, and then goes blank, just when the desktop
appears ?
On older motherboards, sometimes there are issues with the design
of the AGP interface on the Northbridge chip. That is what drives
your AGP slot.
The FX5200 is a pretty well behaved card. I own a couple of them,
and they both work on my old 440BX board. So the cards are pretty
tolerant of old and new motherboards. (I've also run those two
video cards on a 875P based board and a Nforce2 board, both at
AGP 8X, and again, no problems).
So that leaves the 645DX chip on your motherboard.
I downloaded the manual for your board, from ECS. They didn't have a
manual for the "DX+", so I used the "DX" manual instead. The first
thing I notice, is there is no adjustment for AGP speed. Or to
disable fast write.
I also visited the Asus web site. The equivalent Asus board (at least
it uses a 645DX chip), is the P4S533. In the Asus manual for their
board, they have an AGP setting in the BIOS, which can be set to
AGP 1X, 2X, or 4X. The idea would be, you'd enter the BIOS, and
crank down that setting. As long as the Windows driver accepts the
limitation as set in the BIOS, there would be a better chance of
the desktop appearing when Windows is done booting.
On some of the old chipsets (perhaps SIS and ALI), they also
made available a small utility. The job of the utility is to
mess around with the registry. I believe one of the options
in the utility, is to force the AGP speed to 1X, 2X, 4X.
(For the ALI utility in fact, I think it was the only thing
that worked
)
I cannot test that here, as you have to install the SIS driver
package, to get the necessary registry entries for the utility
to play with. And I also cannot tell you, whether the utility is
for use with all OSes. It was probably most popular with Win98SE,
and I don't know if it is still for use with WinXP or not.
This is the last driver from Asus for their P4S533. The adjustment
program is agputil.exe .
ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/misc/vga/sisagp/1.17/AGP_1170.zip
This is the listing Asus has, for the above driver, so it is supposed
to be installable on WinXP:
Version 1.17 2003/07/28 update
OS Win98SE / WinME / Win2K / WinXP
Description SiS AGP WHQL Drivers for Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP V7.2.0.1170
File Size 5.38 (MBytes)
The P4S533 manual is here, if you are curious - it isn't necessary
to download this, and due to the current download speed of the Asus
site, you'd probably run out of patience before it was finished.
ftp://ftp.asus.com.tw/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/p4s533/e989_p4s533.pdf
Now, on the SIS site, they offer this driver. This is their latest one.
The "agputil.exe" is missing from this one, or at least I don't see it
in the installer directory.
http://driver.sis.com/agp/agp121.zip
Basically, I guess what you'd try to do is:
0) Uninstall old driver.
1) Install some new driver version.
2) Get smacked with the blank screen again.
3) Go to Safe Mode, and try the agputil.exe . Now, in safe mode, the
question would be whether the agputil.exe will load or not. Check
in that util, and see whether it offers 1x, 2x, 4x options for
the video card. Try 2x to start, and do a normal boot.
With any luck, if the SIS util updates the registry, the next time
the driver starts, it'll try to run the video card at 2x. And then maybe
it won't blank out.
The other possibility, is the resolution or the refresh rate was
out of range for the monitor, but if you monitor has an OSD (on
screen display), it might have mentioned it was out of range
if that was the problem. It would be harder to tell what was
going on, with a CRT.
It is also possible for the video card maker, to notice which kind of
Northbridge chip is on the motherboard, and sometimes the video card
maker will turn down the AGP slot for you. Some chipsets are notorious
for speed problems, and so the video card manufacturers had to do something
to try to fix it. In fact, some people have the opposite problem - their
AGP slot is "stuck" at 2X, and they want to try 4X. In some cases there
is a hack to tell the video card driver, to allow the higher speed, for
a test. Again, that might involve manually editing the registry.
I wouldn't give up on it yet, as you've paid the money for this
experiment, and you might as well get the full value from it.
I spent three weeks messing with my ALI based motherboard, with a
very similar problem, and eventually had to admit defeat. But at
least I got three weeks of experiments out of it, before chucking it.
Paul
