First post, by MrKsoft
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I was putting together an Athlon XP build and have run into some issues using a Radeon 9700...
The system is as follows, not much in there yet:
Asus A7V8X-X (VIA KT400 chipset) - latest bios 1014.002 installed
Athlon XP Thoroughbred-B 2600+
2x1GB DDR-333
Radeon 9700 (standard version, 128MB)
Promise SATAII150-TX4 card
I can't even boot Windows with the ATI drivers installed, I get a "The device driver got stuck in an infinite loop" BSOD (error code 0x000000ea). Tried a few driver versions with no luck. It works fine with standard framebuffer stuff. I know the card works fine because it runs without issue in my Pentium 4 system with an 845 chipset. I've also tried swapping the chipset drivers out for the official VIA ones instead of the Windows defaults, no change.
I did some Googling and it looks like there were a lot of issues with the KT400 (and most other AGP 8X chipsets) and the R300 cards initially, but I thought they had eventually been resolved. It seemed to stem from an immature AGP 8X implementation but was eased by later BIOS updates and could be helped by setting the AGP mode to 4x. Unfortunately, the A7V8X-X doesn't let me change the AGP speed at all-- it's visible but can't be selected even though the manual says I should be able to. (Actually the manual shows several AGP tweaking options that aren't present!) I wonder if it only activates if I change some other setting?
Anyway, I was wondering if anybody had experience with these cards and KT400, or even this board in particular. Any magic tweaks? I know Athlon XP chipsets can be finicky sometimes... but I really don't want to have to move down to my next most powerful AGP card because it's a Geforce 5200 Ultra. 🙁 I guess I could buy a later card like an X800 or a 6800, but the prices are not particularly great. I'd like to be able to use the 9700 if possible-- it does have some nostalgic value to me as well as it is a card I used back in 2003.
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