ECS K7VZA Rev.3 and Abit Silluro GeForce4MX440 incompatability?

[trinitro]

I've been using a Nvidia TNT2 M64 video card for a while now without any problems. A couple of days ago I decided enough is enough, so I've upgraded to an Abit Siluro GeForce4MX440 card. That's when the problems started. The system would crash anytime an OpenGL or Direct3D game would play, and even in Windows. The blue screen would always mention the Nvidia driver, although the event viewer will list an ACPI error (writing where it's not supposed to). Well, next I went and found there is a BIOS upgrade to fix the ACPI error, so I downloaded it and installed. It made no difference. Next I though well, maybe reloading will solve it. It certanly helped, but it will still crash. Same video driver error. I'm running out of solutions. I've tried disabling the BIOS shadowing, lower the AGP value, disabling almost everything in the driver panel. I've never had any problems with the older card. Am I looking at a bad card? I did notice there I can increase the "driving current", whatever that means, but the manual gives no info on what values to put. DA is the default.
I'm running a Athlon 1G, 512MB ram, 20G Maxtor drive, 60G IBM drive, ECS K7VZA Rev.3 board, Abit Silluro MX440 video card, NIC, CDRW, DVD. There are no other peripherals. I haven't really paid attention to the actual memory value on the blue screen of death, but they look the same all the time. Sometimes the game itself just quits. Sometimes the whole system freezes. There are however no no entries in the even viewer other then "The system has restarted from a bug check". Very descriptive. I'm running XP Pro, I probably failed to mention that.

[Kymera]

You can try using the latest Via 4-in-1 drivers for your board, if you aren't already.

[trinitro]

That was one of the first things I tried...

[Low_Level_Owl]

Well, you said that the BSOD mentioned the NVIDIA driver. Maybe you need to get rid of anything having to do with NVIDIA.

[Kymera]

I suspected it might have been, but you were so thorough describing what you tried I thought you may have left that step out.

Anyway, if you bought it from a local store, try to exchange it, it may be faulty, or try the card in another machine if one is available. I hate it when something that you are really psyched for makes your machine crap out.

I was going to say something about exchange the Nvidia for something else, but didn't want to turn this into an Nvidia/Ati debate. I think we have a thread for that somewhere already.

[trinitro]

I got it from McGlen, there should be no problem getting it replaced. I'll probably try to exchange it for an ATI card, but I've heard those have their own "share" of problems also. Somehow I'm leaning against a hardware issue mainly because it got a lot better after I reloaded XP. Right now I can play Maxpayne for perhaps 40 minutes, before it would run for maybe 2 minutes. Since no other hardware was changed or altered I'm leaning toward a driver issue. I was told that on older version of the Nvidia driver is better, but I forgot the number. Regarding the MB, does anybody know what values I need to put in the "driving current" box to increase the current? I believe that will increase the voltage to the video card.

[kato2274]

had similar problems with ECS via based boards and video cards. Setting Bios to AGP4X disabled seemed to sort things out just fine. theres really no real performance hit from running at 2x as opposed to 4x. try it and see if it works.

[trinitro]

I tried it prior to reloading XP, and it didn't help. I'll try again today, it's still 4X now. Hope that helps...ATI is looking better by the minute..

[Kymera]

If you do decide to go ATI, and that's if I am not trying to influence your descision, you might want to wait for the new ATI 9000 or 9000Pro to hit retail. They should be less than $150US and they kick butt.

[trinitro]

I did a bit more research and found that my problems may be related to a lack of voltage to the AGP bus. "DA" is the standard value (if set to auto), but I've read some posts in which a higher driving control value needs to be used when using a Silluro MX card, although different values were given. Some suggested EA, EF, FE, EE, and FF. I'll start low (EA), then go high (FF), and see what happens. Since the problem occurs 99% of the time when the card is worked really hard (during gaming), a lack of voltage will make it crash. Or that's what I think . Hope I'm right....

[trinitro]

It seems like the problem has been resolved. All it needed is a higher voltage to the AGP slot (using FF as the driving current value instead of DA which is the default). No more crashes. Yet.

[confus-ed]

Originally posted by trinitro
I did a bit more research and found that my problems may be related to a lack of voltage to the AGP bus. "DA" is the standard value (if set to auto), but I've read some posts in which a higher driving control value needs to be used when using a Silluro MX card, although different values were given. Some suggested EA, EF, FE, EE, and FF. I'll start low (EA), then go high (FF), and see what happens. Since the problem occurs 99% of the time when the card is worked really hard (during gaming), a lack of voltage will make it crash. Or that's what I think . Hope I'm right....

Glad to see you've solved your prob. Your thinking is exactly right, increasing the signal strength by uping the agp 'driving' value stops instructions getting 'munched' as they pass through the bus & being interpreted wrongly(kinda like collisions on a network), this is often the case with all the various geforce cards due to the sneaky memory handling routines which they use to get their cards to perform, this is why there is a new range of geforce drivers every two minutes as they try to make their 'non standard' addressing system fit into the agp standards

Really you shouldn't have to up this value but if you want to buy this 'stuff' then when you find a m/b that wants to play 'right' you may have to increase the driving value to compensate, it still produces errors but with other things that have more robust error routines than BSOD's......

BTW - FF is full whack you want to try from DA up... so db,dc,dd....ff(as long as you can count in Hex!), consistently running a high agp driving value may well cook your m/b & video card(especially the video!!) - I don't want to have to post 'I told you so...' later

[trinitro]

Well, I spoke too soon.. I actually tried all values from DA to FF, but FF was the only one which allowed me to finish 3DMark2001 without crashing. But the problem was not fixed. The higher voltage solved some problems, but the fact that the MB's BIOS kept on assigning 4 things (ACPI, VGA, integrated sound and NIC) on the same IRQ (5). Regardless of what changed I made in the BIOS all of those peripherals always had the same IRQ, and I have a feeling that the ACPI and the VGA didn't like to share.... To make the story short I put back my TNTM64 card (with which I never had any problems), and gave the computer to my younger sister. I now have a 950 Mhz Celeron on a Iwill VA133Plus MB which will not detect any drives (but it will work fine with a 533Mhz processor). But that's another challange. Going back to my previous problem, I went and "upgraded" myself to ECS M830LR board with a XP1700+ processor and 256Mb of 2100 DDR, plugged in my GeForce440 card and so far no problems. Not one reboot or crash. And of course, the video card has it's own IRQ... at last. I truly believe that the K7VZA and the GeForceMX440 can't work together... unless I'm missing something... I did discover one "problem" with the new MB however, it will not boot I plug in a ALS4000 chipset sound card. It will boot with a Creative card just fine. It will give me a series of beeps, which I didn't coun't since it was 2 am.... I tried different slots and I disabled the integrated modem and sound card, but to no avail.

[condor]

ACPI and IRQ Sharing are normal in today's boards although they can cause some performance and stability issues in certain situations.

Just for future reference, if you suspect ACPI is causing the problem try to go through the following steps:

1. disable ACPI support in BIOS (is you applicable)

2. Set PnP O/S to disabled.

3. disable any resources you don't use (extra COM ports, LPT port if you're using USB, Legacy sound support)

4. Disable any USB controllers you don't use (no point of having 3 controllers for a mouse and a webcam) sometimes It's even better to use a Ps/2 mouse interface.

5. when Installing (reinstalling) XP/2K press F5 during setup and select the "Standard PC" HAL

Usually you do not need to tweak the drive strenght for AGP as long as you have the latest BIOS.
I would however, recommend that you disable fast AGP writes and make sure you have a PSU that is AMD approved for your CPU.

[trinitro]

Disabling ACPI resulted in a non-booting computer, and since I have already reloaded Windows I wasn't in the mood to do it again... plus, I like the power management features. I also updated the BIOS, and that solved part of the problem. (XP Pro by the way). Before I used to get errors eiter because ACPI did something (write where it's not supposed to), or the video driver did something. After the BIOS upgrade the ACPI errors went away, but another error popped up (more rare), something in the tune of IRQ can't be less or equal then something. Never seen that before. I also has numerous time when programs will simply quit, even Explorer will randomly crash, withough doing anything. Event viewer will show nothng, and all this happened both on the old install and on the brand new install. It has to be related to the new video card, all the problems started right after I replaced my TNTM64 card.