AGP Port Problem

[esturk]

Hello all. First time poster. Posted elsewhere and was directed here. Maybe someone here can provide some insight.

Here are my two posts:

My Specs:

Dual Athlon Tyan Tiger
2X Athlon XP 1800's
2X 512mb Pc2100 Acer DDR
ATI Radeon 9700 Pro
Creative Audigy I Platinum
Generic NIC Card
80 gb IDE IBM Deskstar
250 gb IDE Western Digital
Sony 510a (?) Dual Format Burner 4X Internal
52X Sony CDRW
430 W Enermax PS
Thermaltake Xaser III Case
Thermaltake 5 CPU Fans
Windows XP Pro

The story:
One of the exhaust fans in the case stopped working and my machine was getting a tad hot. I had the side panel off monitoring it. I had been doodling along playing when I tried to load up a game and the machine locked up. (It's been a pretty stable platfrom for me but I have had a few virus and what not lately and have not reformated or fixed that well). When this happend I reached down and touched the 9700 to get a feel for how hot it was. I gave it a little static zap and here we go. I normally live in a low elevation humid environment where static is absolutely no problem. I moved for a summer job and am in a desert where of course it is awful. My bad . .. Anyway on with the story: I rebooted and the machine turned on fine. The pic on the monitor in color was hosed. It had blocks of colored lines through it in various places. Moving windows around on the screen caused the effect to worsen. The machine remained like this for a few days. It was running just fine save for the poor pic. I switched monitors and this affirmed that it was the video card . . (or so I thought)

The fix:
I figured the video card was the problem and so I picked up a 9800 pro and began the install being very careful about grounding myself to the case. I installed the card and I plugged the molex connector on the vc into a power string running through my hard drives. Turning on the system caused a beeping. I immediately turned off and did not notice if I had a picture at that time. I figured that the line was not giving enough power. I then plugged into one with less devices on it. Booting did not produce any beeps but no pic either. Another pertinent fact is that I had the bios set to display a summary screen after boot. At this point the board always beeps. I now get no beep.

The problem:
I have tried both the 9700 pro and the 9800 pro and each give no pic on the monitor. I have tried pulling everything out save memory/cpu/ and card and still the same. I have switched monitors and I get the same thing. The board does not have onboard video and I don't have access to a pci card to check that. My prognosis is that maybe the agp slot is fried. It doesn't make sense to me how the 9700 was working fine before though. It is possible I zapped it again. . . but I was VERY careful this time.

Can some people please give me thier opinions. Do you think the cpu's are fine? Maybe just a new board? If so what dual athlon board supporting XP's would you guys suggest?

Sorry this was so long. I wanted to give you all the details. Thanks ahead of time for any help!!!

esturk



And an update after I got that "fixed":

An Update:

I got a new motherboard off ebay. I wish I would have gotten another board but I ended up with the same for price reasons and the usb mess.

The machine ran for a few days. I tried to do a clean install and things went bad.

Problem now:
When I try a clean install it sometimes freezes. If I get it through then as soon as I reinstall (regardless of what if any drivers I install), the machine does an endless reboot. Safemode either freezes or reboots when it loads amdagpxp.sys. VGA mode and regular mode either yield a black screen or reboots.

What I have tried:
New PS 560W Termaltake . .same symptoms
Switheroo of Ram . . same symptoms
Different HD . . same symtpoms
Various BIOS screwing with . . same symptoms
Different VC . . same symptoms
PCI VC . . didn't recognize at all
3 different XP discs . . same symptoms
Reseated cpus . .same
Different HD . . same
Had someone else do the install and then used that hd . .same


I installed Redhat Ent ES. The install went fine. I know nothing about Linux but at the end of the install it said it couldn't initialize the x server . . I guess that is the gui. I didn't mess with this as I was just wanting to see if it would make it through the install without freezing.

Anyway, I need help. I have fought with the thing for a week and I am going insane. Suggestions guys?

My diagnosis:
Agp Driver is not happy with the 9800 for some reason
Board screwed

Thanks for any thoughts guys. And also thanks for all the previous comments on power.



Any insight you guys could give would be great. Sorry for the long post. I thought you might need all the info.

 

[esturk]

Did I post in the wrong forum? I did not see a tech sup forum.

 

[Crashman]

OK, I'll try to help since nobody else is. I hate VIA chipsets. The company screwed me badly a few years ago and I haven't gotten over it.

First thing is, the VIA supplied drivers often don't work properly with your video card drivers. This is true with various VIA chipsets using various drivers, regardless of whether you're using an ATI or nVidia card. I'll give you an example to clarify: I have an old VIA 4-in-1 that works with MVP3 chipsets (even though they're supposed to be universal for all VIA chipsets). Now, I've installed that driver on newer boards and had the same problem you described, with nVidia TNT2 and GeForce2 cards. But another VIA driver, newer, that I've tried, worked with the KT133A but caused the problems you described on my MVP3 boards.

My solution has been that, except for the MVP3, I never install VIA's drivers. The default Windows drivers seem to work fine. So I use those. Then when installing ATI video cards I used ATI's version of the VIA GART driver, then install Catalyst 3.7 (the most stable version I've found). On older ATI cards I use the default driver for the video card as well.

Also, I've found that once the VIA drivers are installed, removing them doesn't always cure the problem. Therefor I suggest you try this: Settup the drive clean, DON'T instal the VIA supplied drivers, install the ATI supplied GART driver and the Catalyst driver, and hopefully everything will work.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>