For experienced users only......

[dbal]

Ok I have the Radeon VE working happily on my ABIT BE-6 mobo for about 3 months time.....The question applies much to theory but I am a bit curious for everything on my comp and since I can't find the answer it kind of breaks my nerves.....
So, we all know that the first thing we see on the screen after the beep that indicates life in the system, is the bios info about the graphics card we luckily -or not- have, right? Well, in my case, the bios goes straight to the Award ver. bla bla bla , Pentium III bla bla bla thing even though its settings clearly say "Init display first: AGP". I know it's for the 2 graphics cards owners setting but what the hell causes that override? Can Anyone with some free time available answer me???

PS: I had the same trouble with the detection of my CDRW in the IDE channel at startup but I raised the bios delay setting for its detection and it was fixed. No similar setting can be found for the card though....

 

[NicColt]

I saw a post on this way back and if I remember, it's part of the AGP bus implementation. All AGP cards must comply to this. In layman's terms if AGP sees something in the AGP slot it will Init that one first until something else tells it not to. I could be wrong though.

 

[rbV5]

So you're whinning because you don't see the stupid video bios display at boot-up?

 

[dbal]

Problem is not my whining, thing is that nobody in the forum seems to be able to guess a solution to the issue for the very first time....

 

[vss1980]

dbal, that message that is displayed by graphics cards is purely advertising in my opinion.

There is no need to see any message at all and many cards still dont show a message.
For example, my brother has an Athlon 1.4GHz on a Asus A7V133 board with a Radeon 8500 and there is no graphics card BIOS splash screen - straight to the main BIOS info.
Same motherboard with an old ELSA TNT2 Pro, and you have to wait 2 seconds while we get a nice bit of info telling me the graphics card thats in there, then comes the normal BIOS.

S3 cards tend to only hold a message for about a second before proceeding. Leadtek take about 2 seconds.

 

[dbal]

Thanx a lot - even the fact that it happens in other configs as well like your brother's solves the question for me. I tend to agree also with the statement that it's just advertising and nothing important. It's just the fact that I hadn't ever noticed that before in any system.

PS: In case u see it, rbV5 that's the kind of answer I would expect from a "platinum member"....

 

[vss1980]

Lol @ "PS: In case u see it, rbV5 that's the kind of answer I would expect from a "platinum member"...."

Anyway, sticking with the topic, this is something thats been going on for ages with graphics cards (and I mean PCI and ISA cards).
Example, ATI Mach64 and Rage graphics cards displayed a spinning ATI logo which slowed the boot time by an extra 1.5 seconds, whereas a Videologic Graphicstar 600 (Tseng ET6000 chipset) displayed no BIOS message at all and added no extra time to boot-up.

There have only been two instances where a manufacturer has actually put anything useful in that splash screen at boot-up:
Trident used it to show you if the card was properly using 16-bit ISA (yeah this goes back a bit) and some other technical info which may have been helpful. Leadtek, on my Geforce DDR, shows a memory count so, if it is a memory test (which is what it appears to be), then I have no real grudge against it.

 

[rogue1979]

Flashing to a different video card bios can alter or stop the display of info on boot up. When using the Nvidia reference Quadro2 Pro bios my card displays the Quadro2 junk in the boot up. I am using the Nvidia reference Geforce2 Ti bios now because it is faster, and I have no video diplay in boot up at all.