Motherboard's AGP Slot Problems?

3701 Views 5 Replies 2 Participants Last post by vipermaniac, Aug 12, 2003

vipermaniac

Discussion Starter · Aug 7, 2003 (Edited)

I have a P4 2.4 Ghz w/ 533 FSB, on an ECS L4VXA2 motherboard, 512MB DDR PC2700, 120 GIG + 40 GIG Hard Drives, 1 CDRW and 1 CDROM, modem, soundblaster PCI 128 and a GeForce 2 MX400 with a 350 Watt Power Supply. All the parts are bought recently except the video card. When I assembled the system and booted it up, everything worked fine. Installed WinXP and all, but as I tried to play games on the GeForce 2 (any games, from Half LIfe to C&C Renagade, C&C Generals to NHL 2002) it loads onto the menu, then when i click to start the game, the game either freezes and crashes, sending me back onto Windows. Even worse, sometimes it causes the whole computer to restart out of nowhere. Sometimes the games works for a min or two, sometimes barely a few secs. I first thought it was the Drivers so i downloaded the newest drivers for the card yet it made it worse. There were errors once i turned on the computer, forcing me to shut down the computer. I seriously thought it was the video card itself so I borrowed my friend's ATI Radeon 8500. Installed it onto the motherboard and booted up the computer, games still had the same problem, so i installed the latest drivers for it but once i did that and restarted the computer, the monitor would shut off or lose the signal from the video card once windows is done loading. Downloading and installing Direct X 8.1, 9, did not work. I tried taking off 120 GIG hard drive, modem, sound card, thinking that it was the lack of power yet it still had teh same problems. I downloaded the latest drivers for the motherboard too including the AGP drivers, did not work. I reformatted..did not work. I reset the bios, even try to adjust the settings for the AGP...did not work, same problems with the games. Funny how sometimes if i open a folder with a lot of graphics (a folder full of pictures) or open a movie file, it would crash and cause me to close the folder or windows media player. I know the CPU is not overheating because its idle temp was only 31 C. On one last attempt I installed an old 32 MB Stealth III PCI video card. To my suprise, the games worked without crashing, just that they all suck because of the crappy video card. Do you think it's the AGP slot on the motherboard or does the motherboard not like me? Please Helllllp!

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Bluezman

· #2 · Aug 8, 2003

start >> run >> dxdiag

On the Video tab, check if AGP Accelleration is enabled or if it is grayed out.

If it is not enabled:
start >> run >> smartgart
try to enable it there and reboot.

If it doesn't stick to dxdiag and is still disabled there, try enabling it in the bios settings, update motherboard drivers/flash BIOS.

Or try RivaTuner and see if you can enable it there.

Just a guess, tell me if it worked...

--Bluezman

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vipermaniac

Discussion Starter · #3 · Aug 10, 2003

Thanks for responding to me. I did the dxdiag thing that you instructed and the AGP accelaration was enabled. I also did the direct x tests and they all passed. I recently exchanged the motherboard and proessor (1.5 hour drive, that sucks) to frys and got a new one. Installed it and the same exact problems occured. Now i'm thinking it's not the motherboard. Then today, I played Need For Speed II (very old game) and it also crashed, giving me an error stated below:

The instruction at 0043cb0f referenced memory at 000000011
The memory could not be read from

iSNDdirectstop
-Couldn't stop primary buffer

This led me to believe that it's my memory thats causing these problems, my friend said that cheap memory might have something wrong with them. I currently use a stick of K-Byte 512 DDR PC2700 RAM. Can it be because of the cheap ram?

In the motherboard manual, it states that the board uses unbuffered DDR SDRAM, supporting DDR266, DDR333 with up to 166 mhz memory bus. On the box of the memory, it says ISO 9002 registered memory but everything else seems to match the requirements. Do you think it's the RAM? Thanks a lot!

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Bluezman

· #4 · Aug 10, 2003

I am actually far from being an expert to be honest and just reproducing expert advice I received and that has worked for me. Just so that you know

From what I understand, cheap RAM can be an issue but you can check this by using a RAM tester. It is basically a tool that is being loaded from a floppy disk when the PC boots. It is loaded into the RAM of your video card to keep the regular RAM empty so it can be tested. The program runs by itself for a couple of hours and reports errors.

Unfortunately I cannot provide you with the program itself because I am away from my home PC right now. But do a google search on "ram tester". I will get back to this thread next week and see if I can find the URL to the program that I used.

The program can only help you identify the most obvious errors in your RAM so if it doesn't find anything that doesn't mean that there is no chance of being an error anyway. But IF it finds something you can be relatively sure that your RAM is faulty. Maybe borrow some RAM from a friend, it is easy to replace and do some testing with it.

Good luck,
Bluezman

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