Artifacts upon boot w/ GF4 4400 & Compaq

Xenogears

Junior Member
Jul 21, 2002
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Yup, I got a friend with problems on his GeForce 4 TI4400. A shame too, paid a nice $200 for it. Anyways, here's the skinny. When installed, it will boot...but the BIOS screen will be garbled, the Windows splash will be garbled, WINDOWS will be garbled..and often times it simply resets. With a TNT2...it's fine. Interesting huh. I simply can't figure it out. I upgraded the BIOS of the Compaq system...the board is based off Via's Apollo chipset, and I thought they were for Intel chips, but obviously not, cause he's running a Ghz Athlon in there (200Mhz based)..anyways, any help would be greatly appreciated, especially from people with Athlons using the Apollo & Apollo Pro chipsets for AMDs (??? I swear they were Intel only cause I thought AMD board were based off clock speed, KTxxx)...anyways, thanks!!

Andrew
 

Crapgame

Member
Sep 22, 2001
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Odds are the PSU in the Compaq aint worth spit as well as propriatary and non-upgradable, last one I opened had a 170watt power supply and funky connectors that looked like AT but were really ATX.
 

AnAndAustin

Platinum Member
Apr 15, 2002
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;) That would be my guess too Crapgame. If he's running an Athlon (rather than K6-2) then he should certainly have an AGP2.0 spec slot (not the same as AGP 2x 4x etc) so that wouldn't be the problem. Most probably the crappy PSU can't dish out the necessary current, I take it he isn't o/c'ing as that could be the problem. You could try disabling AGP4x in the BIOS or setting the AGP Aperture to 64MB and ensure an IRQ is assigned to VGA/AGP, other than that I'd try that 4400 in another PC and check it isn't freaky!
 

BarMan

Banned
Jan 4, 2001
1,204
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Nah it's not the PSU it's the actual card I bet. If you can try it in another machine to see if it gives you artifacts you'll see that the card is screwed. Somehow the core or the mem on the vidcard is bad. Same thing happened to me when I ordered a Gainward GF4 4400 from Newegg.com - Thread Here.

I saw RMA the thing or tell whoever you bought it from to replace it or refund it.
But yo should try it in another PC before hand to make SURE it's not the PSU.