Alright I'm having big problems

[priest2003]

I'm without solutions at this point, and I'm hoping maybe one of you can help me. I have a pentium III 733 mhz/384 pc133 ram/soundblaster live sound card. Here's the problem: I recently upgraded my video card from a geforce 2 32 meg, to a ati radeon 9100 64 meg. I just can't get it to work. Basically what it's doing is when you install the drivers for it, and you try benchmarking it, the scores are terrible. eg. 1700.....or 45-55 fps(actually a little worse than the geforce 2). I tried installing 4 in 1's and when I do that, it really gets pissed off. I reboot my machine after installing the 4 in 1's, it starts loading windows xp pro, and then freezes up to a black screen. At that point the only was to get into windows is to go into safe mode. My motherboard supports 4X agp, so I already ruled that out. If I test on let's say 3dmark2001e or something similiar, the high quality test is horrifically bad. It usually won't even get through the high detail test without crashing out(it simply just forces the program to stop working and exits)

I really hope that one of you guys or gals might have an idea of what you might think is happening.

Thanks,

Wes

P.S.- I received another card because I thought the other was bad, but again I'M WRONG! :*(

 

[Keysplayr]

Did you set a restore point before you did any of this?

 

[selfbuilt]

I'm not sure of the current state of your system, but I'm thinking a clean Windows install may be in order soon. You need to have the AGP driver from the 4-in-1 installed for you to get to 4X AGP speeds. It sounds to me like your driver is not installed and you only at 1X. Part of your problem may stem from the other 3 drivers in the 4-in-1 .... you don't need them, so make sure you only install the AGP driver.

If you don't want to do a clean install just yet, I would remove your current Catalyst display driver and control panel, remove the 4-in-1, then re-install just the AGP driver, then the Catalyst drivers and control panel. I would expect you to be able to bench in the 5000s on 3DMark 2001 with your current hardware, if everything is working well. Good luck with it!

 

[priest2003]

Originally posted by: selfbuilt
I'm not sure of the current state of your system, but I'm thinking a clean Windows install may be in order soon. You need to have the AGP driver from the 4-in-1 installed for you to get to 4X AGP speeds. It sounds to me like your driver is not installed and you only at 1X. Part of your problem may stem from the other 3 drivers in the 4-in-1 .... you don't need them, so make sure you only install the AGP driver.

If you don't want to do a clean install just yet, I would remove your current Catalyst display driver and control panel, remove the 4-in-1, then re-install just the AGP driver, then the Catalyst drivers and control panel. I would expect you to be able to bench in the 5000s on 3DMark 2001 with your current hardware, if everything is working well. Good luck with it!

Actually I did do a clean windows install. My motherboard is already configured to 4x agp speeds. When I installed the 4 in 1 drivers, it seemed to make my system lock-up upon windows installing, and went to a black screen and wouldn't allow windows to load normally. At that point the only way to get windows to load successfully is to go into safemode and uninstall the dang ati drivers once again. The only thing that I see that you have written that I have not done is to install only the agp driver. But even if I did that, I still don't understand why windows would have went to a black screen upon installing the 4 in 1's.

MSI explained that maybe flashing my bios would be helpful in this situation. I don't know if this will be helpful for any of you but my mobo is a msi6309 version 1.0. The tech at MSI thought that maybe flashing it would be helpful. He also stated that taking out my soundblaster live card would maybe give some info on the loading of the drivers. I don't know...I'm not a professional nor do I know if it would be advantageous to do what he said. That's why I came here. Please shed some light on this.

BTW. Thanks for you help.

 

[selfbuilt]

I find the bus mastering driver in the 4-in-1 can cause system lock-ups in some cases (or defaulting into MS-DOS compatibility mode on older OSes). Best to just try the AGP driver alone ... without it, you will not be running your system at 4X speed, even if the BIOS is set that way. A good way to know what speed you are actually running at is to look under the SmartGart tab in the ATI control panel (advanced display properties, if you have it installed, which you should). It should say 4X (if the AGP driver is installed properly). Also, I would leave fast writes off in the BIOS and at this screen - it won't help you, and can be another source of conflicts.

The BIOS upgrade is not a bad idea, if re-installation of the drivers doesn't help you. I would save that as a last resort, though, once you have exhausted the simple software/driver solutions mentioned above. Removing of the sound card is probably just to test to see what happens under a minimal boot up sequence .... I don't see that helping you troubleshoot your problem too much on its own. Play with the drivers first (i.e. just AGP driver, Catalyst driver, and control panel), then think about flashing your BIOS.

Good luck!