Ge-force4 ti

[TaiPan705]

Hello,
I have a 64Meg ge-force2mx, its too slow now so I bought a Inno3D Tornado Ge-Force4Ti 128Meg DDR Titanium.

my system..
Athlon 1500xp
Win98se
256 Meg Ram
SB live 5.1
64Meg ge-force2mx

Iv read tho about 200 posts here and seen a few things I should add to help
Motherboard is an American Megatrends (has a built in sound and modem or lan card, which i disable in Bios)

also my power unit is, Model :LC-A300 ATX total output 300w max

I put the card in my machine and put back on the drivers from the cd and then the newest nvidia 41.09 drivers, but when i started a game (counter strike) after a min or so the screen froze and I couldnt get out using alt-tab or atl-ctrl-delete I had to press reset.
this happened loads of times and i changed drivers and finaly format the hard drive but still it crashes in all my games.
I give up and go to bed, get up and hit the power button and the computer doesnt show anything on the monitor, it bleeps twice pauses and then bleeps about 4 or 5 times before nothing much happens and i hit reset only for it to do exacly the same thing.
I take it back to the shop and they shove it into a computer and sure enough it bleeps away and they kindly give me another card
so i bang the new card into my computer and it freezes first time i run Morrowind. I took it out the computer, its back in its box, and iv put my old geforce2 back in.

having read thro the posts here im thinking I need a bios upgrade but although my start up says I have a american megatreands mobo when i visit the web site and they tell me how to find my serial number it seems i have NON-AMI Taiwanese manufactured motherboard and i cant use any on theirs (so they say)
startup says
American Megatrends AMBIOS (2001)

anyone know what I should do? or mabye its not bios??

any help would be welcome

Tia

 

[TaiPan705]

ops forgot to say im using directx 8.2 and have ran the display tests with succes

 

[paparazi]

American Megatrends is just the name of your bios type and not the motherboard manufacturer.
The bios is the small amount of information contained permanently on a chip and is required to first fire your system into life.
Bios means:basic input output system and it initiallizes systems to boot.
My advice would be to either download and run a program such as Sisoft Sandra or simply look at the motherboard and jot down Make and model. Martin Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[wookalar]

I am also an avid Counterstrike player and use a Geforce2 TI for my graphics and XP Pro for my OS. I recently did a format/reinstall of my system and loaded all new drivers from the manufacture websites.

After I loaded the game, I was unable to play CS using Direct 3D. It would play with OpenGL, but not very well. Yet the day before I was playing just fine.

After alot of troubleshooting I figured out that there is a compatibitly issue between XP and the newest detonator driver from nvidia (not sure if it is same for other OS versions).

I fixed my problem by going into device manager, selecting the graphics card driver properties and clicking on the button for "update driver". Even though I had the latest manufacturer driver, it still proceeded to download a "microsoft" driver.

Everything works great now.

-Ed

 

[Tschibo]

TaiPan705!
Try the following options:
1) Open your case to give a lot of fresh air to the card. Sometimes overheating may be the main problem. I haven't seen any card overheating *that* fast, but you may try it
2) Try playing around with the AGP aperture size. Although many say, that doesn't do anything, i solved my problem with it
3) Try disabling AGP sidebanding
4) Set down the AGP multiplicator

Before upgrading your BIOS you should be sure to try ALL other options. What about the card drivers? System chipset drivers?

And when you really want to upgrade the BIOS, be absolutely sure that you have the required BIOS and follow the procedure *exactly* like stated in the instructions. Otherwise you may end up with a screwed BIOS and that's really trouble.

So try the other options above, hope this helps
Greetz
Christoph

 

[TaiPan705]

Agreed Christoph, Iv still not did anything to the bios yet, I did take out both side of the case but its not a heat thing its too quick and very consistant. withing 60 secs of running a 3d game it will freeze.
desktop will run fine (as fine as win98 can)
with the last card I did go into directx and disabled AGP texture accelerationm this did work and i ran morrowind (heavy graphix game) for a few hours, it ran ok but not particularly fast just in a very high rez. I have convinced myself disabling AGP is why the card broke as its just about the only thing i changed (apart from leaving the case sides off)
If I do it again and it does the same the shop I bought it from will go nutz, they are nice guys but not renound for easy take backs. but still why did agp disable break it?

Tia

 

[Tschibo]

Well, it may be a driver problem. I've heard of drivers that don't support sidebanding correctly. If tuning down the AGP speed helps, this may be a hardware problem of the mobo or the card itself i guess.
Christoph

 

[Oldbadger]

Taipan705.
If you are still suffering it looks like you are having the standard Via chipset---athlon---live---Nvidia lockups.
I have been having them since I changed to that combo.
I have tried all the different ways to get rid of this curse to no avail. In the end I switched motherboards to the new Nvidea chipset now I have no lockups.

However this is a expensive way to go. I did cure the problem another way but you will not like it.

If your bios will let you switch from 133 to 100 (both ram and motherboard). This will slow everything down but at 100 you might, like me find no more lockups.
Surprisingly enough the speed drop is small enough so that only in very intensive chip hugging games can you see the difference as you are not dropping the speed of your graphics card.

Costs nothing to try

 

[TaiPan705]

thanx, dropping to 2x or 1x AGP in BIOS does also help but im still getting lock ups, it just take more time.

think ill have to get saving again, get a new motherboard and if I can im gonna drop Athlon and stick to P4s

Tai