A7V8X mobo + Geforce 4 conflicts

[Nathan Phoenix]

Okay, time to ask for help.

Ever since I upgraded my pc, I have been having an odd problem. I am almost certain it is related to the motherboard for a number of reasons.

Prior to my upgrade I had a p3-933, asus CUSL2 motherboard, running with a gainward geforce 4 4200ti, and a very old SB live value. Everything worked fine, albeit a bit slow for the times.

I upgraded by purchasing an asus A7N8X deluxe, athlon xp 2500, and 1 gig of kingston hyper X pc 2700 memory.

Ever since then, I get random crashes in games. Not just any crash mind you, but the whackest crash I've ever seen, as my video blanks to a whole bunch of random colors in a wierd pattern. Within 10 seconds of that happening, the system hard locks, because the last sound it was playing starts looping. I have been totaly unable to determine the cause of this.


I just kind of dealt with having this instability issue for a while, trying things like tweaking various timings and bios settings, but I've had no results. Then, last month we upgraded my wife's pc to a very similar setup - Asus A7N8X-X, athlon xp 2500, 1 gig kingston pc2700 valueram, and she has a geforce 4 as well. she now gets the exact same random crashes that I do, and she also had no problems before (with athlon 1 ghz pc)


This leads me to believe there HAS to be some problem or conflict with the A7N8X line of motherboards. If anyone has heard of this, experienced it, or knows of any kind of a workaround, I would be extremely grateful.


Also, I wanted to note that I get sound issues in games with the onboard sound of the A7N8X-deluxe. Sometimes music in games will just start skipping, and it will remain screwed up until the application is closed. This happens in UFO aftermath, Halo, FFXI, DAOC, everything. This does NOT happen on my wife's pc, which has the A7N8X-X, and a different sound chip on it. Any idea as to what's up with that would also be appreciated.

also worth noting that wife's PC performs FASTER in benchmarks, despite having CAS 2.5 memory where mine has CAS 2.0, and my machine having dual channel ram and hers not having it. My pc has a faster hard drive as well. All specs are basically identical otherwise, except where my pc has slightly more performance oriented (and more expensive) parts.

[Case]

I just kind of dealt with having this instability issue for a while, trying things like tweaking various timings and bios settings, but I've had no results. Then, last month we upgraded my wife's pc to a very similar setup - Asus A7V8X-X, athlon xp 2500, 1 gig kingston pc2700 valueram, and she has a geforce 4 as well. she now gets the exact same random crashes that I do, and she also had no problems before (with athlon 1 ghz pc)


This leads me to believe there HAS to be some problem or conflict with the A7V8X line of motherboards. If anyone has heard of this, experienced it, or knows of any kind of a workaround, I would be extremely grateful.


Also, I wanted to note that I get sound issues in games with the onboard sound of the A7V8X-deluxe. Sometimes music in games will just start skipping, and it will remain screwed up until the application is closed. This happens in UFO aftermath, Halo, FFXI, DAOC, everything. This does NOT happen on my wife's pc, which has the A7V8X-X, and a different sound chip on it. Any idea as to what's up with that would also be appreciated.


Some notes:

1. If you really mean the A7V8X and not the A7N8X, then you do NOT have dual channel memory support. The A7V8X uses the VIA KT400 chipset, and only supports one channel of DDR memory.

2. Have you tried scaling back your memory timings?

3. If you're using the onboard sound, I'm not surprised. Via's audio solution is less than robust.

4. Also, try turning off AGP fast writes in the BIOS

5. Get the latest BIOS update from ASUS.

All these comments apply if you're using the A7V8X. Via's chipset solutions almost always need a BIOS update to get to their optimum performance.

[Timemaster Tim]

Or it might be the SB Live. Does your wife's rig have an SB Live as well?

[Nathan Phoenix]

Some notes:

1. If you really mean the A7V8X and not the A7N8X, then you do NOT have dual channel memory support. The A7V8X uses the VIA KT400 chipset, and only supports one channel of DDR memory.

2. Have you tried scaling back your memory timings?

3. If you're using the onboard sound, I'm not surprised. Via's audio solution is less than robust.

4. Also, try turning off AGP fast writes in the BIOS

5. Get the latest BIOS update from ASUS.

All these comments apply if you're using the A7V8X. Via's chipset solutions almost always need a BIOS update to get to their optimum performance.

Okay, big mistake there. We have the a7n8x, in both machines, not the V. the deluxe version, in my machine, has nforce 5.1 sound chip in it, and uses the nforce 2 chipset. The wife's comp has a lesser audiochip - realtek or something, but we have no problems with it. I edited the original message to correct it, so as not to confuse anyone else.

That said, I have tried some very conservative memory timings which did not stop the crashes but severly dropped benchmark scores. I haven't tried AGP fast writes - I will try that next. There are no BIOS updates available.

Both computers are now using onboard sound and have no pci sound cards in them.

[Sam Jones]

Okay, big mistake there. We have the a7n8x, in both machines, not the V. the deluxe version, in my machine, has nforce 5.1 sound chip in it, and uses the nforce 2 chipset. The wife's comp has a lesser audiochip - realtek or something, but we have no problems with it. I edited the original message to correct it, so as not to confuse anyone else.

Sorry to hear about your problems, not least because I've just built a system around the A7N8X Deluxe. You have the newer PCB version 2 (as do I), while your wife has PCB v1.x. You can look between the PCI slots where the ASUS logo is for the exact version numbers.

My system is stable and fast as hell. I've noticed no distortion with the sound chip and I use it for games and cd/mp3s.

However, I seem to be one of the lucky ones. I've seen a lot of people with technical problems related to this board, although they praise it in the same breath. If I'd read some of it before I'd bought it, I'd probably have gone for the Gigabyte nforce 2 board.

Some questions. Have you installed the update for this chipset (Nforce 2) from the Windows (XP) Update site? If not, *don't* and if you have, reinstall the latest Nvidia Nforce 2.45 drivers. I downloaded the "update" from windowsupdate and it trashed my Nforce sound control panel and made all the sound suck.

Also, check the CMOS battery. ASUS routinely ship with shitty batteries, and it will cause problems with reboots. Exchange it for a good branded type.

My board, which I got last week had BIOS v 1.006. The latest is 1.007 I think, but it doesn't do much and there's lots of stories about nightmare BIOS lockups while flashing the A7N8X deluxe.

The info in this thread may be of some use:

http://www.amdforums.com/showthread.php?s=&postid=2046478#post2046478

[Tyrion Lannister]

It is most likely the memory. I had some nasty crucial stuff in mine and it gave me the same sort of problems - rather than adjust the cas etc until it behaved I went and bought some Corsair sticks. Beautiful after that - best system I've ever had, very stable.

I've heard from other people that the board is very picky about memory.

YMMV

[Nathan Phoenix]

You say it's most likely the memory, but I'm getting the exact same lockups on two different machines. one has kingston hyper-x cas-2 memory, the other has kingston valueram cas-2.5. That makes me think it is related to the motherboard having a compatibility issue. I will try getting older nforce driver installed though. i do have the oen from windows update

[Nathan Phoenix]

Update: If I disable AGP fast writes, I crash within 20 seconds of launching any direct3d app, rather then randomly, generally an hour or more after I start playing.


Update #2: nvidia has apparently released a new motherboard driver package for ALL nforce2 based boards. It is available at the URL below. Hopefully this solves some of my problems - it certainly sounds like it will help with the sound.


http://www.nvidia.com/object/nforce_udp_winxp_3.13

Installation Notes

If you are performing an uninstall of your current nForce drivers, your system will have to re-enumerate all devices and restart prior to install of your new package. Multiple restarts may be required; please comply with all instructions to reboot. Failure to do so may cause the install to fail the installation of needed components resulting in system reliability issues.
Windows XP users must install Service Pack 1 prior to attempting to install this package. Failure to do so will result in the inability to support USB 2.0.
Audio drivers will not install on the following nForce2 products: Chaintech 7NJS. Please use the drivers that come with these products to enable audio functionality.
Release Notes

WHQL certified kit for nForce, nForce2, and nForce3
First release of NVIDIA IDE driver for Windows XP and Windows 2000
General compatibility fixes
Audio Improvements:
Realtek ALC655 codec support added
Fix for BSOD on loading DLS files
Reduced susceptibility to audio glitches under heavy system load; additional fixes for 6 channel GetPosition glitches
ASIO support for recording at sample rates other than 48kHz; lower and more predictable latency
Fixes for NOLF. The 3D minimum and maximum distance and the roll off factor were not being taken into account for air absorption. Also modified reverb gain so that the max distance was taken into account
Fix for EAX reverbs; initialized EAX reverbs to off when querying for the EAX listener interface; updated EAX property handlers to ignore invalid parameters instead of range limiting -- this matches Creative EAX behavior


Windows XP Driver Versions

Audio driver 3.66 (WHQL)
Audio utilities 3.66
Ethernet driver 3.63 (WHQL)
GART driver 3.34 (WHQL)
Memory controller driver 3.38 (WHQL)
SMBus driver 3.38 (WHQL)
IDE In-the-box driver 3.58 (WHQL)
IDE 2.0 NVIDIA driver 3.66 (WHQL)
Display driver 52.16 (WHQL)
Installer 3.77
Windows 2000 Driver Versions

Audio driver 3.66 (WHQL)
Audio utilities 3.66
Ethernet driver 3.63
GART driver 3.34 (WHQL)
Memory controller driver 3.38 (WHQL)
SMBus driver 3.38 (WHQL)
IDE 2.0 NVIDIA driver 3.66 (WHQL)
Display driver 52.16 (WHQL)
Installer 3.77

[Bull]

Well, I feel for you. I had an odd one like this with my VIA chipset when I first upgraded to AMD and I was just hating it. I finally just sold off the parts and put a new box together based on the A7N8X deluxe. I don't have any of the problems you're having and I'm using the onboard sound.

The board is picky about memory timings. I let it detect all the defaults when I installed. When it boots up, it reports the memory running at 166 Mhz. This is ok, since the memory is rated to run that fast, but the cpu is a 2400+ with a 266fsb.

I tried to back the memory down to 133, to make it parallel to the cpu, but the one time I did that, I got a blue screen stop error and it wouldn’t boot to windows. I decided not to fuss with it, set all the bios settings back to the default config, and it ran fine. Otherwise I have no problems to report.

[Tyrion Lannister]

Have you used your jumpers to disable any features you are not using - such as the sata stuff? If you don't you can get some weirdness too.

You guys might find this educational:

http://www.madshrimps.be/?action=gethowto&howtoID=43

[Nathan Phoenix]

Ive disabled SATA, firewire, serial ports, parallel ports, USB 2.0 and the onboard NIC that isn't in use.

memory is running at 166mhz, timing 2-2-2-5, which is the correct listed timing for this module, and I can't seem to coerce it into running at any other speed anyway.

The Nforce driver upgrade did not solve my video/crashing problem. I have not noticed any sound issues, which is nice, but I would have been much happier had the more major issue gotten resolved.

[Aleck]

This may be a stupid question, but can you swap in another video card and check to see whether it might be the card and/or geforce driver install on this machine?

Maybe throw in an old (or new, if you can convince the wife) ATI card or something?

[Nathan Phoenix]

A new card isn't in the budget, i have a geforce 1 ddr and a geforce 2mx that I can throw in , but a lot of the games that I would be trying to test it with would have issues with such an older card.