Trouble with GeForce 6200 on ASUS MoBo

[MarkH]

Hi all,

I hope someone can help me with this. I've got a Chaintech SA6200 video card that I've installed in my ASUS A7M266 MoBo that is not working correctly for my games. The installation goes well, the drivers installed correctly, DX 9.0c seemed to install correctly, but trying to run any sort of 3D game produces varying degrees of bad video output.

Regular Windows XP screen and anything not 3D seems to be working fine.

Here are the system specs.

MoBo - ASUS A7M266, with latest BIOS (1007) with AGP Pro/4x
CPU - AMD Athlon 1.4GHz
Video card - Chaintech SA6200 AGP8x. nVidia 6200 256MB.
RAM - 1GB, 2x512MB PC2100.
OS - WinXP Home.

Here are some of the visual symptoms.

No Limits Roller Coaster Simulator - Black screen, or text on main menu at start comes up as blocks.

BattleField 1942 - lines running down screen right from the very first EA logo. On menu page, screen goes to white and sometimes shows the menu page, they flicker back and forth.

More info. This is the second AGP8x card that I have tried in this system. The other one was an XFX 6600 GT that exhibited the same problems. It is replacing a Hercules ProphetIII 3D GeForce3 AGP4x card that I put in when the system was new.

I suspect that this is a BIOS setting problem, has anyone had similar trouble with an older MoBo and a new video card?

Can't currently upgrade to new system, so this is a stopgap until next May.

MH

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Ben Franklin.

 

[DCB_AU]

Think that it might be the BIOS, why can't you flash it again? Have you tried a slightly older version of the BIOS?

I have had simmilar problems before.
Problems rectified by-
1) ensuring BIOS settings correct.
2) reverting to an older driver. For example, Nvidia says that their new FORCEWARE drivers work with older cards such as GF4 MX440 and many others, but they don't. Screen was sometimes OK at Desktop but any load and it would leave lines on screen or cause lockups.

Remedy- installed older DETONATOR driver 28.32 and everything OK.



<font color=red>DCB</font color=red><font color=white>_</font color=white><font color=blue>AU</font color=blue>

 

[MarkH]

Thanks for the input DBC_AU.

I haven't tried an older version of the BIOS, but the latest for this MoBo is dated 2002, and has been very stable through the long use I have put it to.

I pulled the recommended BIOS settings off of the nVidia graphics card FAQ last night and set those that I could find to the recommended settings. No luck on that front, but I could not find all the settings that were listed and some might be under other names as there is not any sort of standard list of BIOS settings.

Assign IRQ to VGA: Enable
x - PnP O/S Installed: Enable
x - VGA Pallet Snooping: Disable
PCI Bursting: Disable
x - PCI Latency Timer: 128
Peer Concurrency: Disable
x - Video BIOS Shadowing: Disable
Video RAM Cacheable: Disable
x - USWC: Disable/UC
Pipeline Cache Write: Disable
PCI 2.1 Compliance: Enable (Only needed when using PCI graphic cards)
Passive Release: Enable
Delayed Transaction:Enable
x - VGA Boot Sequence:AGP (When using an AGP graphics card)
x - Graphics Aperture Size: 128MB (When using an AGP graphics card)
AGP Turbo Read Mode: Disable
x - AGP Turbo Write Mode: Disable

I've marked the ones that I found and set. If anyone knows the translations to the other labels that ASUS uses in the 1007 BIOS could you clue me in here? The Graphics Aperture setting seems odd at 128MB as the card is 256MB. I have also seen a rule of thumb that states that the Aperture setting should be about half your system memory, which in my case would be 512MB(which didn't work, the machine didn't boot until I brought the Aperture setting back down to 128). Needless to say, I don't really know what this setting actually refers to, just that it is measured in MegaBytes. Time for a google search.

Do the older drivers support a card this new? I believe the oldest drivers to support the GeForce 6 series are around rev 66.9x.

I got no improvement last night setting the BIOS to the recommended settings. So I am still slugging away at it.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Ben Franklin.

 

[cleeve]

Did you check if there is a newer AGP driver/chipset driver than the one you're using?

________________
<b>Radeon <font color=red>9700 PRO</b></font color=red> <i>(o/c 332/345)</i>
<b>AthlonXP <font color=red>3200+</b></font color=red> <i>(Barton 2500+ o/c 400 FSB)</i>
<b>3dMark03: <font color=red>5,354</b>

 

[MarkH]

First thing I checked.

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Ben Franklin.