Radeon 9700 - no picture on boot up/restart (sometimes)

[zebra3]

I'm experiencing an intermittent problem with my new graphics card, a Powercolor Radeon 9700 (non-pro). Often, when I start or restart my pc there is no picture, although everything else seems to be working OK. Manually resetting usually does the trick. I had a similar problem with another Powercolor card, a 9700 pro, which I returned thinking it was faulty (previosuly I had a Sapphire 8500LE which was fine). This has happened on different monitors, so I know it isn't the screen that is faulty. My power supply is unlikely to be the culprit, as its a brand new Antec Truepower 480w beast. The card is firmly fitted in the AGP slot and the connector lead on the Radeon is not shared with any other hardware. Powercolor suggested turning Fast Writes off but this made no difference. Does anyone have any suggestions?

My system specs:
MSI K7N2-L motherboard.
1GB (2x512mb) Crucial PC2700 DDR in Dual Channel.
AMD XP 2Ghz
WD 80Gb 7200rpm/ATA100 HDD (8mb cache)
Windows XP Home (upgrade from W98SE) + SP1
Antec Truepower 480W PSU
Powercolor 9700 np with Catalyst 3.4
Yamaha F1 CDRW
Pioneer 106 DVD
All latest Mboard drivers and BIOS

 

[chaps]

The problem does seem to possibly be related to the AGP slot connection. However, go into the bios and check you settings, make sure the, Primary Graphic Adapter” is set to “AGP” and “Enable”. Try graphic Win size at 64, and AGP 4x, (or 2x etc. Match slot and card settings) control enable- if available.

One time I had this video card from hell, that locked up the system all most every time I tried to boot it up. I had to enable “Palette Snooping” in order to get past the bios and boot the OS. It did not make any sense, but this was the only way it would work. The initial video output (flash screen) looked off normal until the Windows drivers kicked in, but it worked? The problem your are experiencing could be related to the motherboard bios and video card chipset.

Good Luck!

Mike

 

[zebra3]

Thanks Mike, the primary adapter is set to AGP already but I'll give your other suggestions a go. I'll be a bit annoyed if setting the AGP to 4x resolves the problem as the board is supposed to support 8x.

Cheers.