Help! New ATI 8500LE produces garbled video on boot

[AppleTalking]

Okay, this is turning into the graphics card problem from hell here. I posted this thread several days ago when I thought I had problems with my Hercules 3D Prophet 4500 causing my machine to spontaneously reboot. Well, I went and purchased a Gigabyte Radeon 8500LE from newegg.com to replace it, but now I've got an even bigger problem: the video card produces a garbled display right after the "Windows 2000 Professional" boot screen. At first I thought it was just because Windows wasn't happy that I switched graphics cards on it, so I did a complete reformat and reinstall. I loaded the latest drivers from the Gigabyte website and the same thing happens: the thing gets past the splash screen and then just produces a garbled 640x480 screen.

Safe Mode still seems to work fine, and the 2000 install (including SP3) worked fine until I loaded the graphics drivers. And yes, I do have DirectX 8.1 installed. I'm going to try the latest drivers off the ATI site now, but I doubt that will help. Can anyone think of why this is happening to be? Did I get ANOTHER bad video card, or is there some problem with my motherboard? My power supply (although only 300W) seems to be producing enough juice: 1.54v to the AGP slot and 4.86v on the 5v rail according to the POST screen. Here are my complete system specs:

Enlight 7237 case with 300W Enlight power supply
Epox 8K7A motherboard (AMD 761/Via 686B chipset)
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1200MHz. processor (not overclocked)
512MB Crucial PC2100 RAM (passes memory checks at POST)
40GB IBM 60GXP hard drive (amazingly, no real problems with this yet)
10GB 7200RPM Maxtor hard drive
AOpen 12X DVD-ROM drive
Yamaha 8x4x24 CD-RW drive
Generic floppy drive
Gigabyte Radeon 8500LE video card (not overclocked)
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card
Texas Instruments FireWire card
Linksys 10/100 NIC

USB Devices: Microsoft IntelliMouse, Symphony HRF adapter, Samsung ML-1210 laser printer
PS/2 Devices: Microsoft Natural Elite Keyboard

 

[Insane3D]

Ok, you said you did a fresh install of Win2K right? Did you load the AMD AGP drivers before you tried to load the Radeon drivers?

 

[pitupepito2000]

Hi,

I don't know if this will help, but give it a try:

right click on your desktop screen
go to properties
go to the settings tab
go to advanced

You will see the properties of the video card why don't you try changing them a little bit and see if that will work.

I hope this helps!

 

[AppleTalking]

Insane3D - yes, I loaded the latest version (5.33) of the AMD AGP Miniport before loading the latest ATI Reference Radeon Drivers (CATALYST 2.2)

pitupepito2000 - thanks for the suggestion, but I can't get to a desktop with the graphics drivers loaded, so unfortunately I can't do what you said.

Thanks guys,
Nick

 

[pitupepito2000]

Why don't you try booting of your Win2k disk? I think that win2k has the same feature as WinXP where they let you go back to the last known good configuration.

Ok, here is an idea. I know that when you get to the screen of Windows 95 you can choose from safe mode and other options. One of the options is to boot by command meaning that the computer will ask you before performing any opertation. You can try this I think is the last option, and then when the computer tries to load the drivers for the video card you just say no. I hope this helps I haven't tried it myself in win2k.

I hope this helps!

 

[Markfw]

Well, after 2 video cards that give you the same problems, first I recommend that you find a PCI "cheapie" $5 1-4 meg video card (should be able to get one at a used hardware PC store if you don't already have one). Make sure the entire configuration is good first. Then do a scratch install of 2000 (the most bullet-proof OS at the moment for business). Then once you are that far, try the new video card. There could be other bios settings that could help. and I am not sure which ones to tell you to use. See if you can at least get to a good install first, and then reply back. If not, maybe your motherboard is bad.

 

[AppleTalking]

Alright, here's the way things stand now.

I did a test with just my CPU, one stick of memory, my hard drive, and my graphics card installed. The thing rebooted right after the Windows 2000 splash screen every single time (I tried about a dozen times). I took everything out, reseated the motherboard, and then did the test again. I even put in a different stick of memory this time. Same results, a reboot after the Windows 2000 screen. So obviously it's not a graphics card problem, considering that I have had the same thing happen with two completely different cards.

So what do you think? Bad motherboard? Markfw900, I'll try to do what you ask, but I don't know of any cheap PC stores around here. I may be able to "borrow" a PCI video card from an old computer at school though, so we'll see if that works. I have already tried reloading the "Fail-safe defaults" in the BIOS and have tried virtually every AGP setting there is, but nothing helps. Darn, and I was so sure it was the graphics card . . .

Nick

 

[AppleTalking]

Bump for more information.

I left the thing on all night (9 hours) at the PC Health screen in the BIOS and it stayed up. The voltages are:

Vcore: 1.82v
Vagp: 1.54v
3.3v: 3.41v
5v: 4.88v
12v: 12.00v

I'm going to try to swap power supplies with my family's computer, as they have a 350w unit to my 300w. If that doesn't work, I think I'm going to blame the motherboard. Fair assumption? Any suggestions are appreciated.

Thanks,
Nick