AMD miniport driver?

What is it? What does it do? Where do I get it?

Thanks!!!

The AMD AGP Miniport driver enables a board with an AMD750 or AMD761 northbridge to properly handle AGP. There may be such a driver embedded in Windows 2000, but I wouldn't count on it. In any event, AMD's miniport driver probably supports a bit more, and it's WHQL-certified--meaning that Microsoft considers it stable. Such a statement from Microsoft isn't really worth much, but the VIA AGP miniport driver <i>doesn't</i> have that guarantee. That says something about the comparative stability of the two drivers.

If you have an AMD7x0-based motherboard and don't apply the AMD miniport driver, I wouldn't expect it to run stable. I'd expect it to blue-screen as soon as your video card tried to use any AGP functionality. It might be stable 2d-wise, and generally ok 3d-wise, except for the times when your video card runs out of onboard memory.

You can get the AGP miniport driver for your selected O/S from <A HREF="http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/" target="_new">http://www.amd.com/products/cpg/bin/</A>.

There's also an AGP-related Registry patch you'll need to get Win2K to run stable with an Athlon, no matter what motherboard you have. If you don't have it, I can find it and post a link to it.

Kelledin

bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?

Yes, in that case you need a VIA AGP miniport driver.

But here's another thing--Win2K has an embedded VIA miniport driver if you install DirectX 8.0 or greater. That was one of the fixes in DX8--improved support of the VIA AGP miniport. For me, it proved to be more stable than VIA's AGP miniport driver. Your results may differ; I'd say try it both ways. The VIA miniport drivers can be found at <A HREF="http://www.viatech.com/drivers/index_new2.htm" target="_new">http://www.viatech.com/drivers/index_new2.htm</A>; drivers are the same for the Socket370 boards and the Athlon boards.

Kelledin

bash-2.04$ kill -9 1
init: Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?