ASRock 939Dual SATA II AGP Driver Problems

[Kektek]

Hi,

I recently upgraded my system to the following:

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Diego
ASRock 939Dual SATA II
1x1gb CORSAIR VALUESELECT Memory
ATI Radeon x850 Pro 256mb
Windows XP Home Edition

The video card and all other components (hard drive, Audigy sound card, DVD drive, PSU) were from my old system. The old system had a 1.9ghz P4 and 512mb of RAMBUS.

Almost immediately after installing everything I began having problems with my video drivers. After some google searches, I found out that the board can have strange issues with the drivers. The first thing I tried was installing all of the drivers from the CD that comes with the motherboard. This resulted in a reset loop where the computer would lockup shortly after Windows started and repeat this process after it reset itself. I had to reinstall Windows because safe mode wasn't operating correctly. I tried installing just the AGP drivers from the CD after the reinstall, and this created the problem again, so I was pretty sure that was the problem.

I tried another reinstall of Windows and updated everything through SP2. Then I tried installing the AGP drivers from ASRock's website followed by my ATI drivers. This was somewhat better, as the system still crashed after the install but it would not loop. It stabilized after one crash. After that, I was able to successfully play World of Warcraft at a clearly improved framerate from my old system. Unfortunately, 3DMark06 actually saw a drop in performance and the system specs showed that it wasn't recognizing any AGP functionality whatsoever. I tried several different setups with different versions of drivers, but the best I was able to get was a stable system that apparently didn't recognize my AGP slot. Again, WoW and Call of Duty 2 seemed to work well.

A large number of people on forums said they had similar problems, although most of them eventually found solutions. Most people said that as long as you installed ULi's integrated drivers v2.13, then rebooted before installing any video drivers, the system should work. I finally tried formatting my hard drive, reinstalling Windows again, and following that exact installation pattern. Again, it locked up as soon as Windows started and was stable after the second reboot. I have to reinstall 3DMark06 to see if it's still failing to see my AGP card, which I assume will be the case.

The other strange thing is that after this last try my device manager is showing "Unknown Device" under "Other Devices." I have no idea what this is, but it only appeared after I installed the AGP driver and the ATI drivers.

I've seen a lot of other people running ATI cards on this motherboard with no problems whatsoever. If anyone had to work through this problem or sees something I'm doing wrong, I'd love to know. If I can't get it to work properly in the next few days I'm probably sending it back to newegg and getting a new motherboard and/or video card.

 

[Kektek]

I've made some progress on this problem.

The most success I've had is with the AGP driver downloaded from ASRock's website, listed as 2.30.

I uninstalled all video drivers and AGP controller drivers, restarted, and installed the 2.30 driver. Then I used Windows Device manager to install my ATI drivers from the CD. Without having to restart, 3DMark recognized my AGP 8x and bios-set aperture. Since this was a step in the right direction, I tried restarting, then installing the entire ATI package from their website, including CCC. Again, 3dmark recognized my AGP bus and CCC did as well. However, 3dmark did NOT recognize my AGP slot on my motherboard. Instead it has my card listed as PCI and the bus listed as AGP.

My score came back as 1685 with everything installed properly. This seems ok in comparison to other systems running my video card and approximate cpu speed. It makes sense against my previous system's score of 1490, too, as the video score was almost identical while my processor score nearly doubled (same video card used for both tests, P4 1.9ghz for first and Athlon 64 3700+ for second).

One strange fact is that my old system was running at 4x AGP while my new card is running at 8x. I'm surprised this had almost no effect on my graphics score in 3DMark. This is probably a question concerning the nature of the benchmark more than anything, but it could be a result of the AGP drivers still not functioning properly.

Since CCC is recognizing the card as AGP 8x and so far the games I'm interested in running have worked, I think I'm going to be content with my setup as-is for now. It's serviceable and I can easily pop in a PCI-E card if I want to upgrade in the future, especially since I haven't heard of any problems with that slot.

If anyone can think of a reason why 3dmark wouldn't recognize my AGP card under my motherboard, or why it's listing my video card under PCI, it would be much appreciated.