Lujan

Hey all, thanks in advance for any help you can lend.

I have a 9700 Pro with Cat 5.11 drivers; the control center won't allow me to change my SMARTGART settings to anything from off, regardless of my BIOS settings. Another symptom of the same problem is that in dxdiag, AGP Texture is grayed out as disabled or unavailable or somesuch.

I initially went to ATI with this and after a few weeks of back and forth they've suggested sending it in to them for warranty work. I don't really want to pay shipping and wait all that time, and I feel like it should be something that is fixable from my end. So here I am. :)

Here is the laundry list of what I've done so far:

• Ensure Microsoft .net framework was up and running and reinstall CCC.
• Make sure my mobo drivers are updated (custom computer with MSI PT880 Neo board; VIA chipset)
• Make various BIOS changes, the most recent of which came from ATI: Fastwrite off, AGP to 4x from 8x, AGP Voltage to 1.6 from auto.
• Install and reinstall DirectX 9.0c, mobo drivers, Catalyst drivers

I've been getting the drivers from the official websites so I don't think I have faulty versions.

I have my complete dxdiag here:
http://fodlujan.homestead.com/files/DxDiag.txt

Let me know if there is any other information you need and I'll do my best to get it to you! Thanks again for any ideas!

peterdiva

AGP aperture size has to be at least 32mb or AGP texturing is turned off.You also might find something of interest here.http://www.tweakguides.com/ATICAT_1.html

UncleMacro

Your AGP driver is not installed. That will cause SMARTGART to be stuck at off after a reboot. Some other motherboard drivers are installed so I'm not sure why your AGP driver wouldn't be installed too. Have you tried all of the chipset drivers on this page? This isn't related to your video card. This is a motherboard issue. If installing VIA's drivers don't work, then you might try uninstalling your Catalyst drivers (run the "ATI - Software uninstall utility" in the "Add or Remove programs" window), installing VIA's chipset driver, and then reinstalling the Catalysts. You'll know you have the AGP driver installed when the "Driver: n/a" starts listing a driver and a date. For example, in one of my computers it looks like this:

Lujan

You, know, craziest thing- I went to install the hyperion 4 in 1 (second on the page you linked) and I only had the option of installing 1 driver, the inf or somesuch. Shouldn't there be something like 4?


My Aperture size is currently 64MB and as far as I can ascertain AGP is enabled in my BIOS.

Any ideas as to why this might be happening?

UncleMacro

That shouldn't be happening. I don't have a motherboard with the PT880 but I do have a KT600 so I tried installing that same hyperion 4 in 1 driver. It gave me three choices: VIA PCI IDE Bus Driver, AGP Driver, and VIA INF Driver 2.30A. All of them allowed checkmarks. The one you need is the AGP Driver. Have you tried going ahead with the inf installation, rebooting, and then installing hyperion again to see if the AGP Driver option then shows up? I've never had to do that on any of my VIA motherboards but it's easy enough to try.

One other thing you could try is updating your motherboard BIOS if you don't currently have the latest one installed. I don't think changing video cards would have any affect because all the hyperion installer should have to do is recognize the PT880 and then it should allow you to install the AGP driver.

I've looked around in the manual for your motherboard and I don't see any AGP options which would affect whether it installs the GART (AGP) driver. There isn't any way to disable the AGP slot that I can see.

About the only other thing I can think of to try is to run SYSPREP. It can be used to strip all the drivers from Windows XP when you are about to swap motherboards. I've never run it personally but other folks around here have. I've asked someone who's run SYSPREP to make sure that it will do what I'm suggesting so don't try this until he's weighed in. You could run SYSPREP to strip your drivers and then reboot. Then you'll have to load all your drivers over again. You could do the hyperions first to maximize the likelihood of it installing properly. It may not make any difference but it's one way to reinstall your drivers from scratch without having to do a clean install of Windows.

linderman

Yes / Uncle Macro is 100% correct / when you run SYSPREP (very easy) it does strip ALL drivers from your current system / but leaves all your programs intact and untouched ???? you will need to be prepared to install all drivers fro your system including the motherboard chipset

by the way Uncle: this is a very clever fix for a nasty video card driver situtation / very impressive !!! I wouldnt have ever thought of that kind of approach :(

here is the sysprep link and how to
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=772307



kudos

joe

Lujan

Uncle: Yeah, I tried the install-reboot-install approach but nothing changed.

Nice idea with the sysprep. I'm pretty busy at college and I won't be on campus this weekend so I'm not sure when I'll have enough time to do this (I'll want to have the reinstall packages for all my drivers on hand), but I'll be sure to let you know what happens once I do.


Question: If I'm going to reinstall a bunch of drivers at once, do I need to reboot after every install that prompts me? Or can I cancel them out and install them all at once with no ill effects?


Thanks so much for spending the time on this to help me out. :)

UncleMacro

The "official" rules have you reboot every time but you can avoid that if you're careful. You need a reboot after you install the "foundation" drivers like the motherboard chipset drivers because lots of other things depend on them and won't be recognized until you reboot. But in my experience, you don't need to reboot if the drivers are unrelated. Like I'll sometimes install the video card drivers, audio drivers, modem, etc. and just reboot once.

Lujan

Gotcha, thanks. I'll be back in touch one way or another...

Lujan

Ok, so I gave it a shot and didn't lose any of my drivers-- the process is pretty straightforward so I don't know that I did anything wrong. I extracted the deploy.cab and ran sysprep (2.0), then selected "Use Mini-Setup" and "Detect non-plug and play hardware". Then I hit reseal and told it to go on ahead.

It shut down, I rebooted and went through the very straightforward process of setting everything up (it didn't give me any options when it came to driver issues), and when I eventually got back in windows everything was the same (though I do need to reactivate windows now).


Did I do something wrong or is this another anomoly of my machine?

UncleMacro

I just ran SYSPREP on a Win2K machine (a test victim machine) and it did the same as yours. SYSPREP didn't strip out the drivers as thoroughly as I thought it would. I expected to have to reinstall all the motherboard drivers but it just decided to start up with the same ones. It could be that it just goes with the existing drivers if the hardware hasn't changed. Oh well. At least it didn't do any damage.

I have one other idea you might try. You can get direct access to the individual drivers within the 4 in 1 package by unzipping the hyperion .EXE file. I poached this from someone else's dxdiag with WinXP Pro installed on an MS-7008 (same as yours) motherboard:
VIAAGP1.SYS is in the hyperion package with a VIAAGP1.INF in the WinXP directory. You may be able to go into the device manager, open up the list under System Devices, and then manually update the driver for your "VIA CPU to AGP Controller" entry. You'll have to manually aim the driver updater at the WinXP directory and see if it will install the driver.

Lujan

I saw your message and planned on trying it out once I got back on campus but I can't seem to figure out how the extract a .exe file...?


Thanks again for all your help!

UncleMacro

I did it as follows:

• download hyperion.zip from VIA.
• Open hyperion.zip with WinZIP and extract the hyperion.exe file.
• Open hyperion.exe with WINZIP and extract those files. That will give you the individual drivers in the hyperion.exe file.

The trick is unzipping it twice to get to its "real innards".

You're welcome. We're here to help. It's actually fun sometimes to figure these things out. They're kind of like techno-puzzles. I just wish they all had happy endings. Sometimes we can't figure it out and other times it just turns out to be broken hardware so there's no solution other than replacing stuff.

Lujan

You, sir, are a genius. That seems to have done it; dxdiag claims AGP is available and the CCC is giving me positive signs for everything. I've yet to fire up a game to make sure everything seems good but there isn't any reason to expect it won't.


Just a quick question; in my dxdiag there are several entries like these:


Name: VIA Standard Host Bridge
Device ID: PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_7258&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_00\3&61AAA01&0&07
Driver: n/a

Name: VIA Standard Host Bridge
Device ID: PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_4258&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_00\3&61AAA01&0&04
Driver: n/a

Name: VIA Standard Host Bridge
Device ID: PCI\VEN_1106&DEV_3258&SUBSYS_00000000&REV_00\3&61AAA01&0&03
Driver: n/a



Is it a problem of any sort that I don't have drivers for those? Or are they essentially "empty slots" and therefore don't need drivers?

UncleMacro

Those VIA Standard Host Bridge don't have a driver so n/a is okay. Most devices have drivers but some don't. You can usually find other people's dxdiags with similar hardware posted in forums with a bit of googling like this one so you can see what it's supposed to look like.

That's what I keep telling everybody.

Lujan

awesome, thanks. Sorry to take so long to reply but I wanted to double check that everything seemed to be in order (so busy with college...).

I just played BF2 for a few hours and everything is in working order, except the game is running a bit choppy. I'm assuming thats just game and BIOS optimization related, though.

Speaking of which (and this'll be my last question in this thread, I promise :)), do you have any tips on aperture size? I see you have the same card that I do, and I've heard anywhere from 64 to 256 MB as preferred. I've currently got it set to 64. Thanks!

UncleMacro

Every web page I've seen on the subject of AGP apertures seems to have a different opinion on how to set it. The only way to be 100% sure is to run tests on the game you're interested in and watch the minimum frame rate. The minimum frame rate will drop if the aperture is too small. But you've got 2 gig of RAM so I'd set it to at least 256MB in any case. There's no point in having it set to a small value like 64MB when you've got that much RAM. I've seen benchmarks of hogs like BF2 where the minimum frame rate dropped if your AGP aperture was too low. It doesn't actually use the RAM up until a game needs it so it doesn't cost you any RAM the rest of the time.

Lujan

great, thanks.