I sent the following to Abit's tech support but I figured I'd send it here as well.
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I'm having problems getting your Abit KR7A-133R motherboard to work with
Geforce4 video cards. I bought a PNY Verto Geforce4 TI-4600 card along
with your motherboard and I've experienced quite a few problems getting
them to work together.
First, when I go into the raid bios I see patches of vertical lines
throughout the screen.
Second, These same lines show up right away at the
Windows XP boot up screen. The machine will boot up into WinXP initially
before I try to install the Nvidia drivers for my card after that WinXP
either just reboots right at the first bootup screen or locks up with odd
graphic anomalies, like the patches of vertical lines I described earlier.
Changing certain bios settings gives me different kinds of lock ups and
graphical anomalies at this point.
Third, I tried running a linux distro called Knoppix (www.knoppix.com) which
will load fine but the odd patches of vertical lines will show up on the display.
Having WinXP and Linux both experiencing problems should rule out any OS dependent
problems.
All this may seem to point at a faulty graphics card but I've taken this card and
put it in a Dell P4 system and it worked flawlessly with the same Nvidia drivers.
I also tried a Visiontek Geforce4 TI-4600 in the abit board this card doesn't show
the odd vertical lines in the raid bios or during WinXP startup but WinXP still
locks up in the same place as with the PNY card.
Trying one more time with a Leadfast Geforce4 TI-4400 it produced the same
effects as the visiontek.
So to summarize, that's 3 different Geforce4 cards that work fine in other systems
that do not work with my abit board.
Another thing, I can run my system fine using a old S3 2meg PCI video card
or a ATI 32meg AGP card.
So, the system will not work with Geforce4 cards.
I tried using the PNY Geforce4 card with fail-safe and optimized default
bios settings and neither made a difference. The system still didn't work.
I've tried the 6n revision bios that came on the motherboard and the updated
9n revision. Updating the bios didn't help anything.
And to make things even weirder, I RMA'd the first board with the company
I ordered from and after getting a brand new abit board the EXACT same
results happened using the PNY Geforce4 card.
Thats two different KR7A-133R motherboards that do the exact same thing.
Is this a known problem with an easy workaround? Please help me to get this
video card working properly with the KR7A-133R board.
Here's a listing of the components for my system. I currently do not
have the sound card installed though.
Antec Mini-Tower ATX Case with 330 True Watt Power Supply
Abit KR7A133 - RAID AMD Socket A DDR ATX RAID Motherboard 266FSB
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
Pioneer 16X DVD Slot Load 106S
Mitsumi 1.44 Floppy Drive - (MTSD359M3D)
AMD Athlon XP Desktop 2000+ Socket A CPU 266MHZ FSB
IBM 80 GB 7200 RPM ATA100 120GXP Model 07N8084
PNY Verto Geforce4 Ti4600 128MB AGP
Linksys LNE100TX EtherFast 10/100 PCI NIC with WOL
Generic PC2100 DDR 512MB
============================================================
I'm having problems getting your Abit KR7A-133R motherboard to work with
Geforce4 video cards. I bought a PNY Verto Geforce4 TI-4600 card along
with your motherboard and I've experienced quite a few problems getting
them to work together.
First, when I go into the raid bios I see patches of vertical lines
throughout the screen.
Second, These same lines show up right away at the
Windows XP boot up screen. The machine will boot up into WinXP initially
before I try to install the Nvidia drivers for my card after that WinXP
either just reboots right at the first bootup screen or locks up with odd
graphic anomalies, like the patches of vertical lines I described earlier.
Changing certain bios settings gives me different kinds of lock ups and
graphical anomalies at this point.
Third, I tried running a linux distro called Knoppix (www.knoppix.com) which
will load fine but the odd patches of vertical lines will show up on the display.
Having WinXP and Linux both experiencing problems should rule out any OS dependent
problems.
All this may seem to point at a faulty graphics card but I've taken this card and
put it in a Dell P4 system and it worked flawlessly with the same Nvidia drivers.
I also tried a Visiontek Geforce4 TI-4600 in the abit board this card doesn't show
the odd vertical lines in the raid bios or during WinXP startup but WinXP still
locks up in the same place as with the PNY card.
Trying one more time with a Leadfast Geforce4 TI-4400 it produced the same
effects as the visiontek.
So to summarize, that's 3 different Geforce4 cards that work fine in other systems
that do not work with my abit board.
Another thing, I can run my system fine using a old S3 2meg PCI video card
or a ATI 32meg AGP card.
So, the system will not work with Geforce4 cards.
I tried using the PNY Geforce4 card with fail-safe and optimized default
bios settings and neither made a difference. The system still didn't work.
I've tried the 6n revision bios that came on the motherboard and the updated
9n revision. Updating the bios didn't help anything.
And to make things even weirder, I RMA'd the first board with the company
I ordered from and after getting a brand new abit board the EXACT same
results happened using the PNY Geforce4 card.
Thats two different KR7A-133R motherboards that do the exact same thing.
Is this a known problem with an easy workaround? Please help me to get this
video card working properly with the KR7A-133R board.
Here's a listing of the components for my system. I currently do not
have the sound card installed though.
Antec Mini-Tower ATX Case with 330 True Watt Power Supply
Abit KR7A133 - RAID AMD Socket A DDR ATX RAID Motherboard 266FSB
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
Pioneer 16X DVD Slot Load 106S
Mitsumi 1.44 Floppy Drive - (MTSD359M3D)
AMD Athlon XP Desktop 2000+ Socket A CPU 266MHZ FSB
IBM 80 GB 7200 RPM ATA100 120GXP Model 07N8084
PNY Verto Geforce4 Ti4600 128MB AGP
Linksys LNE100TX EtherFast 10/100 PCI NIC with WOL
Generic PC2100 DDR 512MB
