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A7V and Geforce Problems

stogie

Junior Member
My problem with the A7V and Geforce cards (both Creative Labs Annihilator and Visiontek Geforce2MX) is when I enter any program that requires 3D acceleration, my screen scrambles and locks up. This occurs in both Windows 98 and ME, with either A7V bios 1002a or 1004d. This doesn't show up right away in either OS, however. Lockups within games (ie QuakeIII or HeavyMetal FAKK2) occur at progressive rates until simply opening the programs locks up the OS. No 2D crashes have been apparent.
Ive reloaded drivers (older and newer), uninstalled and reinstalled cards, including removing modem and sound card. This problem originally showed itself when I was running Win98, after exhausting all fixes known to me I decided to try slicking my OS partition and starting anew with ME. All went fine with the install and detection of the cards, and once glsetup was installed I was able to run QuakeIII and other games, but not as smoothly as they should have been. Lockups increased until simply opening the game froze the OS. I ve been back and forth with the A7V Bios settings and uninstalled and reloaded 4 in 1 and agp drivers. Nothing seems to affect this problem. What should I try next?
 
eek.... you've got problems.
my poor advice would be-
after a clean format, install the agp driver from the 4-in-1s and install a 6x det driver. Keep ALL other expansion cards out and see how the stability is (run a long 3dmark loop or something).

I run a v7100 on an a7v and have never had any problems (until i put on dx8, DOTE!). It may be a resource conflict, and removing the other cards would fix any resource conflict.
It is also possible that the lockups may be heat related or you may have a hairline fracture in you a7v, or a million other things. Sorry man, you've really tried all the "quick fixes". Also check out the geforce faq for any other possible "quick fixes"
 
I have no problems with my Annihilator Pro and A7V.... unless its in Win2K... anyways here is a bit of advice to try. #1 Try No Fast writes if you have them on. If you dont, go into the BIOS and change the Optimal Setting to Normal... that fixes alot of stability problems and only causes about a 1-2FPS loss. Also make SURE you have VIA 4 in 1 Driver installed.
 
Scrambled screen??? sounds like you may have heat problems on your graphics chip. How long can you play before it locks??? I recently had this problem with my GeForce DDR. I romoved the stock hetsink and replaced it with a pentium heatsink. Then put a big 80mm fan on it. You could try just mounting another fan next to your graphics card and see if that helps, before replacing the heatsink. Some heatsinks are easy to remove and others are more difficult. When I took the heatsink off, the heatsink grease was broken down( dry and cracked, powdery). That couldn't have been good for it. I don't think the heatsink fans that some companies put on the nvidia cards are adequate cooling.
 
I've tried the no FastWrites and Normal settings -- no change. I can't even open QuakeIII without it locking up now. All seems to be normal while browsing, or any other productivity task. No lock ups then. I'm beginning to wonder the same about the hairline crack. I may try to reload Linux on this machine and see if QuakeIII crashes. 4 in 1 drivers have been loaded, unloaded and reloaded. As far as heat goes, I had no trouble with either of these cards early last week while I was running them on a BX board with a PIII. I can start the machine from sitting cold overnight and this still happens right away when attempting to load any program with any sort of a 3D load to bare. This is occuring on both boards, I don't think I screwed up both of them!?😕 Thanks for the suggestions!
 
Something else to try, may work, maybe not. I've seen some strange things on a few Abit BP6's with AGP aperture settings. I would try 32MB,64MB,128MB and 256MB. Yes it will play crappy at 32MB, but just give it a try. I've had 2 pretty much Identical systems one had 128MB ram the other 256. One machine would lockup on every AGP setting except 64MB, the other would lock up on every setting excpet 128MB. There is no reason I can see that it should crash one way or another, but it did.
 
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