Bacillus
Yes, thats the one, big thanx.
Rhapsody:
A reinstall may not help you. I have incurred this problem endlessly. This was mostly due to my love of the BX chipset. By throwing in a 133 bus CPU (like a 1 gig PIII) I get the benefit of an overclocked agp card: 87.9 MHZ instead of 66. I can also run the (out of BX spec) PC133 ram at speed. With everything cooking, I get 7550 scores in 3DMK. But I have literally spent several full 40 hour equivalent weeks playing with different settings, drivers, DX versions, etc., bringing me almost to the point of madness. I have seen the 3dMK bench so many times, I now cover the monitor with a shirt when its running. If you look on dejanews, and do a search - "geforce lockups", you will get over 7000 hits. I feel that nVidia card vendors have let their customers down bigtime, by assuming you put the card in the slot, load the drivers on the CD and youre good to go. It SEEMS to work, until you put in a particular game, then things freeze hard, requiring a reset to get going again. Alternately, you get the instant black screen thing, also requiring a reset. Trust me - you are not alone and it is not your fault - do not feel like you are a dummy.
There is a complex relationship going on here between the motherboard, the chipset, the PCI bus, the Vid card, the AGP bus as bridged to the PCI bus, the card drivers, and that goddamned Direct X, and its own drivers.
To get you started, you must read EVERYTHING from top to bottom on
www.geforcefaq.com You MUST have AT LEAST Powerstrip 2.78 (or 3 beta) AND NVMax (or tweak) loaded and running, or you wont have a prayer.
I could write a book on this mess, but just a few things here:
You must begin by bringing AGP speed down to 1X, either in BIOS, or by registry typein, and disable sidebanding and fastwrites. You must disable all video cacheing in BIOS. I have personally been using MSI BX Master (now discontinued) and the Soyo SBAIV+100. The MSI will run at 2X (AFTER tweaking), but the Soyo will not (same BX chipset/vidcard). But the 1X Soyo gets better 3DMarks than the 2X MSI. Note that AGP Ver.1 allows for 1X or 2X, ver. 2 allows for 1X, 2X, or 4X. (a bit confusing)
An earlier NVMax (Nov.) had a setting "optimize DirectX 5/6/7" that saved my ass on a Transcend Mobo that would not run 3DMark even with 5.22 drivers. This changes hexadecimal settings in reg keys. This tweak is gone on newer (Feb) NVMax.
The first boobytrap you will incur is the nVidia drivers default load "PCI Textures" at 31 or 47Mb (for 32 Mb card) in D3D and OpenGL. Since the card you are using is AGP - there are NO PCI texture reserves needed (!!!!!!!!!!), and they should be set at 1 and 2 (the mins). Remember, the drivers also have to work for the legacy PCI TNT cards.
The next boobytrap is the monitor performance or options settings: let Win. decide, Generalized Monitor Timing (GMT), or Discreet MT (DMT). New (current) monitors support GMT, 1.5 years - 3 old support DMT, older let Win., but also depends on which date monitor .inf file you load.
Some cards are more viable for OC. Elsa is the worst, Visiontek and Leadtek are the best: will post at 150 (99mhz video)
HSF choice for nvidia chip is EXTREMELY important. Factory is crap. Little TennMax lasagna B works. USE THE PAD!!!!! (nothing to peel)but dont touch/wipe it. The nVidia chip is dished .0015, so normal heatsinks only touch at edges of chip. Artic Silver doesnt work on this chip material - for me anyway. Test your chip heat by putting your forefinger in small square 1/2" area on backside of card that corresponds to where chip is (on top, in case) to periodically feel for temp. Had a friend who put a full peltier water cool setup on his card and was able to run a "freezup" card at full fast settings - no prob. Never plug hsf into card - ALWAYS into case header. Voltages into these boards are marginal at best.
Another very important option loaded into nvidia pages by tweak is how many frames rendered ahead (D3D). I had to use 12 frames ahead for a FIC board that would always stop in first "adventure" test. 3-5 are recommended range.
The Geforce is a bus hog, holding on for 248 clicks. This is why SB Live cards (heavy bus use streaming audio) in PCI slot one (shared with AGP on all boards) would cause probs. If you look carefully on Powerstrip site, you will find instructions for lowering Vid AGP device bus latency by adding two lines in PStrip.ini file in Windows dir. I set mine at 64 or 96 with prob cards. (Advanced Options/Graphics info/Windows/details) Note that PStrip .ini settings are only saved on REGISTERED versions (not shareware). As far as I am concerned, the AGP slot has invalidated use of the PCI slot 1.
Yet another boobytrap is cases that do not allow full seating of video card in slot. Always check with small flashlite to see if you can see card edge traces above plastic header. Any bit of trace visible means NFG. I always use highest brass spacers (5/16) even if 1/4" come with case, even if I have to retap screw holes bigger. Do NOT dismiss this factor!!!!!!! Card MUST be 100% seated, not 98%. The otherwise fine FongKai 320 case is especially dangerous in this regard.
Well, thats enough for now, getting a little long here.
Facebook
Twitter