translation of tech lingo required

[DrDel]

can someone please translate this for me pls (a tech guy emailed me these solutions)?

"try turning off the AGP fast write option in your BIOS,
(and if your in Windows XP go to the video controll panel, to
advanced section, trouble shooting page, and disable write
combining)"

my problem is my ati radeon 9700 pro keeps rebooting the machine whenever I try to play a 3d game, all 2d games and all other winxp apps work fine... I have an amd 2200+ with 512 ram...

the first part of the tech help, I assume means going into BIOS and turning the AGP setting from 8x to 4x, right?

and as for the second part.. wtf is "video control panel"? does that mean go into control panel and select the "display" icon? if it does, I dont see anything called "disable write combining".. can someone help pls?

 

[Bovinicus]

The first part is just what it sounds like. There is an option called AGP fastwrites. Disable that. You can try lowering the AGP transfer rate too, but stick with 8x unless problems still continue with it enabled.

I don't know of anything called write combining, but I assume that is what he means by the video control panel. It could possibly mean ATi's software control panel; give that a shot.

 

[DrDel]

Bovincus

thanks for the tip, but I figured out the BIOS setting before reading your message.. and guess what? the setting is automatically disabled from the manufacturer, so it is already done.. and I switch the AGP c onfiguration to 4X just to make sure that the 8X setting wasn't causing it.... neither of these work..

the second part of the tech support's message is still confusing.. and I cant seem to understand it.... weird... somethings I think tech support are the one's who need the support...

 

[DrDel]

anyone else know why my dang system keeps crashing/rebooting everytime I play a 3d game? (and ONLY with 3d games?)

 

[Pink0]

The 9700pro has some problems with some boards in agp8. Keep running it in 4 and see if the problem keeps happening. Update your bios. Make sure that you not only have ATI's drivers installed but also your AGP drivers. The ATI software will allow write combining to be used which is a feature of AGP. There is a way to turn this off in ATI's software. If you can't find it try the rage3d forums. Usually you just go into display properties, settings, advanced, name of card tab, aditional properties. Read below:
Software Write Combining
Application or driver software can use a write combining technique to separate WC store operations from competing with WB store traffic. This minimizes the number of bus transactions and ensures 64 bytes are written to memory on each bus transaction. Using software write combining, uncacheable writes to memory are written to small temporary (WB type) buffers. When this temporary buffer is full, the application or driver copies the contents to the WC destination.