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System boots to black screen or boots and shows wavy distortions. Please any suggestions?

D

Doobu

Junior Member
I have a PCI Graphics card and everytime I've tried to replace the PCI Graphics card and put in an AGP Graphics card in the AGP slot either the system doesn't bootup to Windows or it does but I just can't see anything and it's black (that was with a Matrox G400). Or, the system does boot up to Windows (This was the Diamond Viper II and Diamond Stealth III S540 Xtreme), but the image isn't stable at all. Meaning there seems to be wavy distortions. Like you can see the icons or the border of a window or even text sorta move in a wavy fashion. Does anyone know what's wrong? It seems like it's the AGP slot because everything works fine with a PCI Graphics card. Anyone ever have this problem before? Is it a faulty AGP slot? I have an Aopen AX6BC motherboard by the way and Celeron 300A oc'ed to 450.
 
Hrmm, whenever I have weird problems that don't have an obvious solution, I always try to make the "base test case" simple. In this case, the first thing I would do is turn down the overclocking and run the celeron at 300MHz. Second, boot up with the PCI video card, and once in windows, remove the display adapter from the device manager. Then power down, pull the PCI card, and try putting in the AGP card. Boot the system back up and see if it attempt to install the AGP card drivers in windows.

If this fails, the next thin I would probably do is borrow an AGP card form a friend and try that out, just to make sure it's not the card that is the problem.

Let me know if any of this helps,

-Matt🙂
 
I haven't tried a base case in which i clocked the Celeron 300A to normal 300MHz operation. But the PCI Graphics card (Viper V330) works perfectly. I've tried 3 different graphics card so I think I've tried enough. When I installed the Stealth III S540 Xtreme and Viper II the drivers were loaded automatically by Win2K but when I tried to install a Matrox G400 it wouldn't even boot up to Windows. So I don't think the overclocking has anything to do with it. I could be wrong though... but come on... 300 to 450 on a Celeron is not really strenuous overclocking.
 
What's your monitor?

Usual cause is card not seated properly. Although sometimes, your monitor is not capable of the refresh rate that the new video card is dafaulting to. Can you boot in safe mode with the AGP card?
 
Well, might as well try the base case to prove that overclocking and your basic components aren't the problem here.

a complete base case would be the following:
  1. place the mobo flat on cardboard (gravity would help determine that everything is seated correctly)
  2. verify the jumper settings for the multiplier, fsb, voltage, and ram speed
  3. plug in the power supply, cpu, ram, video card, keyboard, monitor, power button, reset switch, and speaker making sure everything is seated correctly (leave everything else disconnected, LEDs and fans included)
  4. power on the system to see how far you got

If there was not one bit of difference, one of your basic components must be not seated/configured correctly or bad.
 
Doobu,

I hope my last post didn't sound condescending. That was not my intent!

I take it the Viper II and Stealth III s540 are AGP cards?

The only reason I mentioned the over clocking is that some people overclock their machines with the CPU clock multiplier AND BUS multiplier. If the AGP bus is being overclocked, that could be the cause of the slot failing. Probably not, since this is a celeron, you've probably done just a straight CPU multiplier, right?

I agree with IsOs, try booting in Safe mode with the new AGP card and see what happens.

If all else fails, the only thing I could suggest is trying a different motherboard.

Good luck!

-Matt 😎
 
Saturday my PC started exhibiting the same symptoms. Would love to know if there's been a resolution???

I found two other recently-active threads here with others experiencing the same problem:

here

and here

Abit KA7
Athlon 950
Asus V6600 Deluxe, using NVidia drivers
nothing overclocked
 
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