NEED HELP!

[skumbag]

OK, here's the dilemma... I've got system instability / system auto-reboots with my current setup:

AMD Athlon 1.33GHz
Asus A7V133
768MB PC133 RAM
Asus Geforce 2 GTS video
Windows XP

XP complains about the video card causing the instability, and I'm thinking it's the infamous problem between VIA chipsets and NVidia video cards. So, I'm trying to figure out where to go from here. The two choices are 1. move over to a Pentium 4-based setup with DDR RAM, or 2. move up to one of VIA's newer chipsets like the 266A.

Are there still reported problems with the newer VIA chipsets? I would really love to stick with AMD, but if they aren't going to be stable, I'm going back to Intel.

Thoughts?

TIA.


-Matt

 

[skumbag]

No one have any comments about this?

 

[Pederv]

Do you have the PCI slot that shares IRQ's with the the video card empty?
Check your documentation as to which slot this is.
Don't go by what is shown in Device Manager, Win 2K/XP tries to assign all devices to the same IRQ.
Most motherboards are "hardwired" to share 4 IRQ's among the available slots (PCI & AGP) and they provide a list of how the BIOS will allocate the IRQ's in the documentation.
Plug-n-Play has come a long way, but it still isn't perfect.

 

[Electric Amish]

Do you have the latest 4-in-1's installed?

amish

 

[bacillus]

what wattage psu & is it AMD approved?

 

[Electric Amish]

<< what wattage psu & is it AMD approved? >>



Another good question.

amish

 

[skumbag]

Now that I think about it, IRQ 9 seems very popular among my peripherals. I will see about hardsetting them or freeing up available ones.

Yes, I have the latest 4-in-1 drivers installed.

I have an old SuperMicro SC750 (IIRC) tower case that has a 300W power supply. I don't know about it being AMD certified.


-Matt

 

[QTPie]

I have 2 GF2 GTS in a P3 and TBird computers, both use VIA chipset and have no problem.

Set everything in the BIOS to auto (plug and play OS, IRQ and DMA resources)
Install latest Via 4-in-1 drivers (4.37), I have no problem with 4.37

 

[Yossarian]

Step 1: Read the FAQ

Step 2: Fix the problem once you know what it is

 

[skumbag]

I followed a lot of the recommendations from a7vtroubleshooting.com, but I'm still having problems. XP is not letting me assign certain devices their own IRQ, like my SBLive. I put the Live card in a slot that is a "shared" slot, assigned a free IRQ in BIOS and of course turned off PNP OS in BIOS. Well, Windows XP will not change the IRQ to what I've assigned it, even though PNP OS is turned off.

What gives?

 

[Pederv]

It's part of the ACPI spec that gives the OS certain controls over the system.
As far as the BIOS plug-n-play OS option and Win2k/XP, I don't think it has an affect. With it off the BIOS tries to assign resources but the OS's remap the resources to the way they want. I leave plug-n-play OS off, just so I can see the list of devices and who is sharing resources (IRQ's) with who.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

my system has win2k on it and was horrible unstable until my most recent install. i installed NO special drivers except the ones at MS windows update. it had some nvidia drivers, but i dont believe any via drivers (could be wrong), anyways, i installed ONLY those drivers, and the system has not froze/hung/BSOD'd since.

this might not be a good choice if you're trying to get the most performance but i dont care because i dont use windows and my girlfriend doesnt notice the difference.

 

[skumbag]

Well, I do have PNP OS turned off in BIOS. How do I get all my peripherals off IRQ 9 since it won't allow me to change them under the Resources tab? No matter what, the sound card, video card, network card and my firewire / usb card all gets assigned IRQ 9! This is driving me crazy!

 

[Pederv]

Since you have PNP OS turned off you should be getting a list of PCI devices during the boot process. If you can hit the PAUSE key fast enough to look at this list, take a look and see if any of the devices have the same IRQ as your video card. If there is a device with the same IRQ, this could be your problem. If the devices in this list that share IRQ's can do so with no problems, then it doesn't matter what Device Manager says.
An example, the list during bootup says my SCSI adapter has it's own IRQ (IRQ10) but Win2K Device Manager says it's on IRQ11 (with the rest of my PCI devices).
The only way I know of having "full control" over system resources, win Win2k/XP, is to disable ACPI during the OS installation. You can try going into Device Manager and selecting Computer, then changing the drivers for the ACPI PC to the Standard PC. That could mess your system up and you may end up rebuilding it anyway.

 

[skumbag]

Well, for the time being, I seem to have stabilized my system by turning off Fast Writes in the BIOS. I just wonder how much of a performance hit I'm taking by turning that off. I wonder if one of the new Geforce 4 cards solves my problem. Anyone using a Geforce 4 card w/ a KT133A chipset and fast writes turned on?

 

[skumbag]

bump