i need help with MSI KT3 Ultra 2 and Gainward GF2

[killabeas]

okay....first off, i have been searching around these forums, and various other forums all night and have yet to find an answer, so if there is another post in here with the answer i'm looking for, please don't flame this thread, cause i have all but burned out my retina's looking for an answer.

i put together a new system the other day with the following specs:

MSI KT3 Ultra2 mobo
AMD 2100+ XP cput
512Mb PC2700 Crucial Ram
350w Enermax PSU
Linksys 10/100 PCI NIC
LeadTek 2000XP PCI Tv Tuner Card
Maxtor 7200 Rpm 40 Gig HD
16x Pioneer Dvd Rom
52x Lite-On Cd-Rom

AND

Gainward 64Mb GF2 w/ TV out

after a fresh install of WinXP Pro, i thought all was going well. I installed dang near everything on the driver cd, and was just using the XP default GF2 Ti drivers. Doing random stuff, my computer locked up, and rebooted, and i got a popup saying that the video drivers were at fault. No big deal i though.... i had the vid card in a 750Mhz machine based on the A7V board before, and it was always real picky about drivers. I installed the newest detonators i could find... 30.82 i think. Booted up fine... As soon as I went to install SOF2 (Soldier of Fortune 2 for those of you that are gaming impared ) it locked up again. I remember seeing on one of my mates' machines that was playing SOF2 at the time, that when you pop in the cd, it goes to the menu screen where you can play, install, configure, etc SOF2, but there is a small movie playing in that window. That movie never came up, and machine locked up. I installed any and all updates from the windows update site and tried again. Still no luck. I removed the drivers, and tried the 21.83, 21.81, and a 23.xx drivers, and even 28.xx drivers. All giving me the same result. I installed the 4.38 via 4in1's, and that didn't help either. BUT, to make matters worse, I know that this problem isn't game specific. I get the same lockup when i try to run the nVidia Earth Viewer, and DX based screeensaver, or dam|\| near anything that has to do with graphics. I almost tried to install CS, knowing that I could run the game in OpenGL, but my cd was not in the jewel case (i lose cd's faster than a scalded dog). I am almost at a loss for words. I am probably going to get the Asus ti4200 when i get my next paycheck, but until then, i NEED a stable gaming machine. Any information, or tips or tricks, or hints, or resolutions would be greatly appreciated. I will check this post several times today, and reply as quick as i can.

Thanks In Advance

 

[AppleTalking]

I don't have a lot of experience with these things, but it sounds like a DirectX problem. Do you have any OpenGL apps that you could try? I know you said you lost CS, but do you have any other OpenGL games? Try one of those and see what happens. If the thing still locks up, it's most likely a hardware issue. If the OpenGL app runs, then I would bet that you need to reinstall DirectX.

Actually, come to think of it, I also remember seeing some kind of DirectX patch for Athlon-based systems. It wasn't at Windows Update, I think it was somewhere in Microsoft's Knowledge Base thingy. You might want to try that and see what happens. The situation that was described (lockups in DirectX games) sounds similar to yours.

Good luck,
Nick

 

[NesuD]

I had the identical thing happen with that same board whwnever i tried installing 3dmark 2k3 or even Sandra for that matter. tried with 2 vid cards a chaintech ti4200 special edition and a visiontek geforce2 gts and got the same problems we have rma'd the board thinking it is a motherboard problem because of several other strange behaviours by the board that were unrelated to graphics. Try installing 3dmark 2k3 and let me know if it locks up when it trys decompressing textures during install that is where it always crapped on us. out of 20 trys i got it to install 3d mark successfully 2 times but it could not run the the program at all. would always lock then reboot at the splash screen. I will post back when we get the new motherboard to try out. may be a few days before that happens though.

 

[JackBurton]

...

 

[Cobalt28]

Hi...

This sounds to me like the infamous "Infinite Loop Error"

There's a lot of information about it and what you can do to fix it here:

Via Arena

Hope that helps...

 

[killabeas]

okay....i finally figured it out....

well, i figured it out a couple weeks ago, but my cable went down the morning after i posted this (in fact it's still down, and i had to get a damn earthlink account)

anyways, i started reading something into how the D3D acceleration is by default turned off in XP. Any time i would go into the DXDiag program, the machine would lock up. I put in an old gf2mx, went in, disabled, then enabled D3D acceleration, and popped the gf2 back in, and everything is working great now. Thanks for the replies though