Issues With Nvidia TNT & TNT2 And Aladdin V Based Motherboards
Most everyone has heard the nightmare regarding TNT & TNT2 working with the ALI-V chipset. Up to date it has always been a hit or miss regarding the compatibility of this combination. Typically, with this configuration the unlucky end-user experiences either intermittent lockups when running 3D games or the familiar "won't boot Windows" problem. This problem lies within the ALI Aladdin V chipset and some timing issues with the ALI-V AGP bus. Unfortunate for Nvidia, this timing issue seems only to arise with TNT & TNT2 based video boards. Both Nvidia and ALI have been working together to resolve these problems. This problem seems to be corrected with a new AGP driver from ALI and a new video driver from Nvidia on some ALI-V based platforms. We have an ASUS P5A revision 1.04 with works great with ALI's v1.60 AGP driver along with Nvidia's version 1.88 driver. However, our Microstar MS-5169 version 2.1 (ALI-V based) with the same drivers doesn't work. Hopefully, both Nvidia and ALI will be able to provide a single set of drivers that takes care of these issues on all ALI based platform. We'll be sure to pass this information along once we receive it.
Issues With 3Dfx Voodoo3 And FIC PA-2013 Motherboard
Because of the known issues between TNT & TNT2 in ALI-V based motherboards we thought it would make sense to choose a platform that was happy with the variety of video boards we were going to throw at it. We chose FIC's PA-2013 with a whopping 2 MB of cache on it. Everything seemed to work great until we began testing the Voodoo3 at 166 MHz and 183 MHz with the AMD-K6 III 450 MHz. After several hours of testing both PA-2013 boards began to fail. First there were problems with some intermittent hangs, followed with intermittent reboots, and finally the system wasn't even stable in the CMOS setup anymore. We contacted FIC and they quickly replaced the bad motherboards but the new ones soon failed after a few 3D tests as well. The FIC PA-2013 board was happily running the AMD-K6 III 450 MHz with the ATI Rage 128, Nvidia TNT2, Matrox G400, and S3 Savage4. Also, the PA-2013 and Voodoo3 (143 MHz, 166 MHz & 183 MHz) ran fine as long as the AMD-K6-2 was installed in the board. Six PA-2013 boards later we decided to retest everything in the ASUS P5A revision 1.04 and the new AGP driver from ALI-V (v1.60) as well as the video drivers from Nvidia v1.88. FIC is aware of this problem and promises a solution. They seemed to have narrowed the problem down to a component on the PA-2013's power supply. In any case, the ASUS P5A (w/512 kB cache) out performed the FIC PA-2013 (w/2 MB cache) with every video adapter I tested in this review.
