Ewano 2004-01-23 05:04
I've just rebuilt my system with some new components to try and get round my Geforce2 MX400 @ 1152x864 problem.
System consists of:
Abit KX7-333R + Barton XP2500+ + Corsair 512MB DDR XMS3200
D-Link 528 Tx network card.
No sound card yet - not till I resolve the graphics issues.
Sapphire R9700NP 128Mb AGP + Iiyama VMPro 454
Hightech Excalibur R9200 128Mb PCI + 2x Iiyama VMPro 413
I presently have the PCI card in slot 2 so as not to share IRQ's with the AGP slot.
I'm running Win2k Pro sp4 and fully patched with all critical updates from win update + Dx9.0b.
The 9700 installed on it's own works fine.
The 9200 installed on it's own also works fine.
Install the pair, and I find that the PCI card is unable to start with a code 10 error..
I've tried setting both the AGP and PCI card to be the primary in the BIOS, but to no avail.
I know that people have managed to get dual ATI card setups going, but I'm wondering if there are any hoops I need to jump through to manage this.
Any help would be much appreciated, in the mean time I'm going to fiddle with a few things and see how far I get. Any results I'll post here.
Any success stories would be usefull too, if possible can you post your specs so I can try to find any patterns..
Thanks chaps (and chapesses if you are out there)
Ewano
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Ewano 2004-01-23 20:59
Quick update, it appears that the 9200 is TV-Out only and not VIVO.
Have tried altering:
PCI/VGA Palette Snoop
Assign IRQ for VGA
Forced ESCD Update
Video Ram Cacheable
Video BIOS Shadow
APIC - MPS 1.4 to try to get some extra IRQ headroom on the PCI bus
Any ideas anyone?
Ewano
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Ewano 2004-01-23 21:24
Have tried moving the card to PCI slots 1,2,3 with no change.
Getting a little despirate here.
Ewano.
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Ewano 2004-01-24 01:53
Update:
I've just installed an Nvidia GeForce 2 MX200 AGP into my system replacing the 9700 I was running (only for testing purposes of course).
After installing the drivers for the Nvidia card, both cards fired up with no problems.
So:
r9700 agp + geforce 2 mx400 pci = OK
geforce 2 mx200 agp + r9200 pci = OK
geforce 2 mx200 agp + mx400 pci = Probably OK, untested in my rig.
r9700 agp + r9200 pci = Incompatable.
Now the question is why? They were both installed from a fresh win2k install with the same release catalyst drivers. So this can't be a previous driver version conflict.
Anyone got any ideas?
Ewano
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Tony 2004-01-24 02:39
Have you considered the following:
If you're running Windows 2000 or XP, you should set Plug and Play OS to "No", "False", "Disabled" (either way, make it in the "off" setting) in your BIOS.
That setting should only be enabled when using Win9x operating systems.
This should clear up alot of IRQ issues.
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Ewano 2004-01-24 11:15
Ok, there is no setting for "Plug and Play OS" The nearest I could get was allowing resources to be controlled by ESCD. I did a little more digging and found some articles on using APIC (Note, this is not the same as ACPI Power Management) in single processor machines to extend the IRQ's available to the system.
I've reinstalled my system as an ACPI Uniprocessor system to make use of the larger pool of avaiable IRQ's.
Still no joy. I even tried shifting an undocumented jumper on the 9200 card - just in case it helped.
Now I've just noticed something odd though.
My Saphire 9700 Non Pro is being reported as a 9700 Pro - it's never been flashed or modded. Not only that, but it's reporting an adapter string of "RADEON 9200 SERIES".
I'm wondering if this might be the cause of my problems with trying to initialise the 9200 card.
Anyone got any information on modifying this string and if that might be the problem?
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ecarlson 2004-01-24 13:29
I assume you've already updated your motherboard BIOS.
- Eric www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Ewano 2004-01-24 20:24
Not had the chance yet, can't seem to find any floppies that are in a good enough condition for me to feel safe about flashing.
I will be flashing my mobo bios later anyway to fix an issue with my barton processor.
Have the second latest bios for my mobo though.
I'm currently going down the route of trying to analyse the bios of my 9700 to see why it's reporting it's adapter string as a 9200.
I just find it odd that the 9200 will start fine with an nvidia card but not with my 9700. I'm contemplating trying another 9200 in the agp slot to see if all ATI cards cause the conflict or if it'll work with some others..
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ecarlson 2004-01-25 02:19
Have you uninstalled all the video drivers, and had Windows rebooted and running with Generic VGA drivers, then tried reinstalling the ATI drivers?
Also, any floppy disk that has no errors after a fresh format should be fine.
- Eric www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Ewano 2004-01-25 03:26
It's a fresh install of win2k. There are no previous drivers to conflict with. I've installed win2k about three times now:
fdisk
format
win2k
mobo drivers - new
win2k patches
dx9b
latest catalyst drivers from ati
same every time
I've just flashed my bios successfully - phew. Always hate that bit till it brings back the successfull message.
Now my processor is recognised as a 2500+, but I still have the same issues with the secondary card.
I'm going to try the cards in another machine and see if it's a mobo problem.
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ecarlson 2004-01-25 14:25
Good idea to try it in another computer. Have you tried installing the ATI drivers right after installing Win2K? Or perhaps install Win2K, then SP4, then the ATI drivers, and worry about the other patches and stuff after the video is working.
- Eric www.InvisibleRobot.com
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Ewano 2004-01-27 03:26
In the end I decided that "something" is stopping this card from working with other ATI cards. I tries it with a saphire 9200 agp and got the same results.
I wonder if it's a driver issue, the only way to tell would be if someone with a working rig tries upgrading to the latest cat 4.1 driver set and sees if their second card ceases to function.
As it is I've gone back to my old setup but I'm now driving two monitors from the 9700 and only one from the GF200 MX400 which gets round the problem of driving the secondary monitors at 1152x864. It's not ideal, as I'd prefer the 9700 to have no extra load on it when playing games with 3 monitor acceleration. (combat flight sim)
Anyway. Case closed for the moment, unless someone finds that the new cat 4.1 drivers kill their rig - in which case I may come back to using the 9200 as a secondary card.
All that remains it to list the system in the database as a non functioning system.
Cao for now mateys.
Ewano
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wbarber69 2004-02-05 22:20
Look dude your doing everything but the obvious, you got two choices unistall every driver then add your cards one at a time starting with the pci, or leave everything put together in one neat package and do a Real fresh install, it's not a fresh install if there isn't any hardware in the computer, windows will do the neccessary irq steering as long as you turn your "plug and play aware os" bios setting to "no" make sure your not caching your video bios since you'd be doing it twice, with radeons the higher they are in the system thats how they take priority, so start with the old pci first then the agp, but her's the good part, after you get one in leave it and add the second one, never one at a time, or in some other configuration with some crappy nvidea cards, installing multiple ati's takes a little finess but it's worth it in the long run, just remember that when you do get them installed that they take priority 2 ways, first (if bios says so) Agp then Pci, but they also take priority as to which head on the card is set higher, so they will probably be numbered agp1(1) pci1(2) agp2(3) pci2(4)
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