MSI Geforce 4 Ti 4200 and Abit KT7A

[Koy]

Alright, my problem seems pretty odd to me, at least I haven't ever seen anything exactly like it before. I installed an MSI Ti 4200 (128 MB) into my system yesterday evening. It appeared to operate relatively normally, though it benchmarked somewhat poorly, for most of the day. I installed all the updated drivers for Win ME and the Detonator XP drivers (all OS related things, nothing was done to the bios at this point). Then...after booting my system the mouse wasn't working, nor the keyboard. After doing that a couple of times, it the monitor simply stopped detecting any video signal at all.

Now, I checked both sticks of RAM in my system (each is 512MB PC133 SDRAM), I removed the power and IDE cable from my drives and motherboard, I have removed all of my other PCI cards. I left myself with basically the powersupply hooked to the motherboard since I only needed it to consistantly boot up to the POST. I tried 2 other monitors, same thing.

Here's where it gets funny. I can use any of 3 other video cards in my house and they work fine. I have an ATI Rage 128, a Voodoo 5 5500 (which was in my machine prior) and an old STB Nitro. All of them work without issue. Gets even funnier here. I happen to have 2 of these MSI cards because I bought one for my wifes computer. I swapped them out. Mine works fine in her system, hers does the same thing in my system.

The last most bizzare part...........if I put any of those cards in my system, and then put the MSI card back in....it will correctly boot between 1 and 3 times before it fails out and will not reboot correctly again until I repeat the process....this occurs with both of the MSI cards as well.

I am at a loss. I have tried upping the I/O voltage in my bios. No change. I upped the core voltage slightly, no change. To be perfectly honest, I am not sure which of those is the correct one to actually increase voltage to the AGP slot so I didn't want to press my luck and burn up my processor.

Nothing I have done has had any effect, so if anyone has any ideas, I would be greatful. Thanks much!

 

[Koy]

Also I guess I should add a couple things

My system specs are:

AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1.4Ghz
Abit KT7A M-Board
1024 MB PC133 SDRAM
60 Gig Maxtor HD
20 Gig Mactor HD (Secondary)
Sony DVD-ROM (old unit, don't remember the speed)
Acer CDR/W
350 Watt V-tech PSU
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1
Linksys LNE100TX
Gina Layla Recording Card

The only components hooked up during most of my trouble shootting were the board, powersupply, memory and ti4200.

I have thought that perhaps it related to power, but I'm not sure it could be because of the PSU itself. Prior to this vid card, I had (have again) a Voodoo 5 5500 and it takes plug from the PSU directly. If my system can run that card, I can't imagine the PSU isn't putting out enough juice unless it's not giving the motherboard enough juice. If it was that the PSU was in adequate to power everything, wouldn't removing power from all the other devices help solve that issue?

I thought it could be possible that the card is grounding itself or the AGP slot somehow after it initally gets power (since it does tend to work between 1-3 times after it is removed from the AGP slot and re-inserted. It always works at least once if another card is put in and then the MSI card put back in). I don't know how likely that is and it seems even less likely that another card of the same type would do exactly the same thing unless it is a design flaw.

If all else fails I would have to chalk it up to incompatibility, though that leaves me wondering if any Ti 4200 is going to work in my machine regardless of the manufacturer.

Anyway, thanks again for any help.

 

[Koy]

Last piece of information that I've noticed. Whenever I put the MSI card back in and get it to boot it's 1-3 times, the system preforms a memory check which it doesn't normally do. Usually it just shows the amount of RAM rather than testing it and counting through it. It also seems to take a few seconds longer to pop the monitor on than any of the other video cards I've tried (which isn't shocking me much considering I'm lucky to get it to work at all). I also at this point have cranked the I/O voltage to as high as 3.9 with no change.

 

[Koy]

Well...for anyone who was concerned that perhaps their MSI card was the issue, that doesn't appear to be the case (at least for me). I ran over to Best Buy and picked up a Visiontek card, also a Ti 4200. It is doing the identical thing.

I have to assume that this is a compatibility issue between the card architecture and the mainboard.

 

[Koy]

Well, at this point I am only posting in case there is someone else out there having a similar problem, because my problem appears to be unfixable. I can't get any response from Abit, Visiontek or MSI and I'm not about to call New Jersey from my house to wait on hold and have someone then tell me to call the motherboard manufacturer.

I took the Visiontek card I picked up back to Best Buy and instead picked up a Radeon 8500LE (I would have gotten an 8500 which they are selling for $199 but they were out dammit). Based on all the reviews and everything I really didn't want to like this card, but so far it's doing something that the other card wouldn't do....it works. Considering this card is also 4x AGP as well and it is operating flawlessly, I have to conclude that the issue is specifically between the motherboard/chipset and the card itself. If you are having this or other serious problems with your GeForce 4 card and you have tried the obvious (and perhaps not so obvious) fixes and nothing has worked, I would follow the lead that RoninRXN and the techs that looked at his system set and contact your motherboard manufacturer and/or the place you purchased it/computer manufacturer.

Me, I'll probably just keep the ATI card, it's benchmarking within 100 Marks of what I was able to squeeze out of the Ti 4200 before it stopped working right and withing 200 Mark of the Ti 4200 that's sitting in my wife's system now so I guess I can't bitch too much.