I'm experiencing strange problems with my new 8600gts videocard, and I suspect it comes from my mobo's PCI-E 4x port.

when playing some games, misplaced polygons randomly appear : in UT2004, the weapon sometimes becomes a weird mass of polygons. same thing for asteroids in Darkstar One, and for the Canyon Flight test in 3dmark 05/06 (the flying ship is corrupted). Most other games run fine.
Mouse cursors also gets corrupted in most 3D apps/games.

the other issue I have is video playback/editing causing random crashes. The computer sometimes freezes/reboots when playing/editing videos. when a reboot occurs, there's a BSOD, but it appears too briefly to read it. The error is reported in the event log as a System Error (error ID = 1003... unfortunately, this ID is undocumented in MS database)

Since these issues appeared when I changed my radeon x600SE for the 8600gts, I suspected a faulty videocard...
I decided to test it on a friend's computer (Asus P5B, E6600, 1GB DDR2, 480W PSU) and everything ran fine.

Here are my complete specs :
case : Antec NSK 4000
MB : Asrock 775 Dual VSTA
CPU : C2D E6300 @ stock
RAM : 2x512MB Samsung DDR2-666
PSU : Akasa PaxPower 500W
GPU : Twintech GF8600gts (NV reference design, driver version 158.22)
HDD : Seagate 7200.10 320GB sata2 16MB (ST3320620AS)
OS : Win XP Pro SP2
all temps OK, voltages OK. system perfectly stable (except in the case described above) even during intensive 3dsmax rendering.

I know this mobo has trouble handling High-end graphics cards like 8800gts/gtx because of it's PCI-E 4x port, but I haven't heard of such issues with mid-range cards...

so if anyone has an idea about it, or has experienced the same kind of problems, please give me feedback. Thx.

I have similar news. My mobo is the 4core dual vsta with C2D 4400 with 2 gigs corsair 5400 ram. Until yesterday It had an Ati x800xt pe 256mb agp flavour. I put in an evga 8600 gts superclock pcie . It worked well initially except that everything has to be reset upon restart. (Putting in the latest drivers from nvidia wrecked up all the setup utilities.) I played Tomb Raider Legend and parts of my desktop flickered on randomly in the game screen.In the hierarchy of video cards the 8600gts should outperform the older ati card. (I am doing benchmarks to compare.) I have put on an Arctic cooler 4 rev 2 cooler on the older card and slapped back in. I went to the Asrock site and they list the msi flavour of the 8600gts as supported as well as the 8800gts for my mobo with driver 158.19. The only thing I can think of is the drivers are buggy or my version of xp pro with vista appearence mod may be a culprit since components of sidebar flicker thru.

Well, I didn't experience this flickering desktop issue... if you think your Vista appearance mod is responsible, try to uninstall it.

Have you tested your 8600 on an other motherboard ?

for the life of me i'll never understand why ppl buy that mobo.

but yeah, it does sound like it's the limited bandwidth of PCI-e x4. but who knows... could be a bad batch of cards. *shrug*

hey guys, read the thread titled "artifact problems "

looks like it might be a bad batch of cards after all. 3 8600's all with the same artifacting problems in the same day? hmmm...

I would suggest communicating with one another to further troubleshoot and see if ya'll bought them from the same etailer.

I don't think we bought our cards from the same retailer, since the "Artifact pbms" thread's OP is in Holland, I'm in France, and well... I don't know where Belles_Toaster is...

and actually, the 3 issues look different. I experience geometry corruptions and video playback crashes, Belles_Toaster has a flickering desktop, and FeareX has texturing issues in Oblivion (the last screen is obviously a normal map)

cccaaauuusssseeeee it allows people like me who dont want to throw away most of their old cpu parts to keep using them in a reasonable way before a biiig upgrade

+ it has agp and pci-e support, and also ddr+ddr2 support.....and only costs about £40

Hello again I am following up on my first post. I bought the mobo 4Core Dual Vsta because computer upgrades can be a bottomless pit for money. I am after the best bang for the buck school. My old mobo was an asus dlx barton board overclocked to 3200xp with 1 gig of corsair value ram ddr400. The Ati x800xt pe gave 3dmark 03 score of 11,120 at 1024 x768 at default. The new mobo setup has the C2D 4400 running @ 2.83 ghz on air no change in thermal output yielding a score of 15344 in the same 3dmark 03 test. I guess there was a "bottleneck". Overclocking with the new cooler needs more testing but there is a difference of +6% .
I bought the Asrock mobo after researching reviews in particular one that tested it with both pcie and agp video cards, as well as to their reference boards with the 8800gts included. Aside from complaints that the mobo was limited in features compared to the more expensive ones the performance hit for the 4x pcie was less than 10 %.

Whatever the cause of the problem is, it has nothing to do with the PCI-Express port being limited to 4X. This would cause a bottleneck in performance, not artifacts.

There's a chance the PSU's the culprit. If you can swap PSU's AND video card at the same time in your friend's comp, then you'll be able to know.

I have this board and a x1650 pro, but I haven't gotten around to assembling that system yet, has anyone had a problem with this combination?

I just have to say that I've been using my ASRock 775 Dual VSTA for almost a year now with no problems running an XFX GeForce 6600 8X AGP card. Last night I uninstalled the drivers by going through the Device Manager, turned the machine off, installed my new XFX GeForce 8600GT XXX overclocked PCIe card, turned it back on, cancelled out of the auto driver programs, and ran the installation disk that came tith the card. Works like a charm, watched a few brief vid clips, using a couple different movie players and played WOW for several hours with maxed-out settings and it worked perfectly.

My system: ASRock 775 Dual VSTA with the 880Pro chipset / 1GB Corsair value select DDR2-667 kit (2 sticks of 512) / Intel P4 (541) 3.2Ghz / WD SATA 7,000 rpm HD / XFX 8600GT XXX (OC by XFX to 620MHz Core) 256MB DDR3.

It gets used for gameing, business apps including CAD, picture editing, and for DVD playback and creation. I've never had any trouble except that Medeival Total War will not play reliably using the newer Nvidia drivers, so I keep some older drivers in a file on my HD and reinstall when I want to play.

The Board has been rock solid and was perfect for me building my first machine using the five bucks a week I save while grocery shopping. Allowed me to use older memory, floppy, PATA drives and agp graphics card. Have slowly upgraded with no problems. Now that I have a PCI-e card, I am saving for a Gigabyte mobo I've seen which will accept the 667 mem and allow later upgrade to DDR3 (and has full PCIe x16). Saving the Core 2 Duo upgrade for the gigabyte board.

The fact that I have an x16 card in an x4 slot doesn't appear to be any problem, and in theory runs at a bus rate similar to the 8x agp. If I also understand correctly, most games will generally not max-out the 8x agp bus for the average player, so there should not be a bottle neck in running a x16 card in an x4 slot. My reason for going this route was as part of a planned upgrade program and to get me DirectX 10, Shader Model 4.0, the nvidia gigathread and floating point lighting.

Oh yeah - if anyone cares, the memory is running in dual channel mode and hyper-threading is enabled. Op system is XP Pro, never upgraded the bios and have no plans to OC (at least not with this board).

wasnt this thread dead?

Apparently its not dead 'cause you're still reading it.

That aside - I felt that there was some value in posting (even to an old thread) because I've seen too many posts saying that there are compatability issues with the ASRock boards and the GeForce 8600 and 8800 series cards. I almost did not upgrade the card because I was worried. I took the gamble anyway and it paid off.

I just wanted to post someplace so that people could read that there is no issue - they should get the card. Isn't that the point of boards anyway?

Besides, didn't you hear, things live forever on the internet.