Help -- Compatiblity Problem With Newer nVidia Card And My Mobo

[Harvey]

Before I get to the problem, please don't get into nVidia vs. any other maker because it won't address my problem. I have to use an nVidia board because, from a lot of searching and experimenting, they are the only maker whose chipsets still support the old DOS VESA video standard, which I need to use for a couple of legacy apps.

My motherboard is a DFI AD77 Infinity (VIA KT400 chipeset), and my vid card is an older nVidia card. I tried a couple of cards from different makers with different levels of the current chips. They all seem to work with the native nVidia drive, but theyl fail when I try to run some of my old aps from the command line, even though my older nVidia cards work fine.

I know it isn't the newer cards because the same cards work in the same apps in a couple of other machines. I've tried various drivers and BIOS updates, but nothing helps my otherwise great machine.

Anyone have any ideas, or am I going to have to accept the fact that this board just doesn't support the cards I'd like to use?

TIA

 

[John]

Hey Harv, which NVIDIA card is it? Which drivers have you tried? If the card is old enough there is a WHQL generic driver that in built into XP. Is this the same card that was in your system when it crashed?

 

[Harvey]

Thanks for the input.

The card that won't work in my DFI board is an EVGA FX5200. The DOS functions work on my old Athlon 650 backup machine. The cards that work on my DFI are an old Geforce 2 and a Geforce DDR.

I tried two other newer nVidia cards on this machine, a 4000 and a 6200, and had the same problem so I'm pretty sure the mobo is incompatible with this motherboard.

The drivers I tried include the native Win XP nVidia driver and nVidia's ver. 71.89. Both had the same problem.

I'm hoping to get a new board, soon and that whatever I get will resolve the matter. I'm going to try to test my DOS setup on a couple of friend's machines to make sure.