Thanks for your ears

hcsvespa7 · Joined: Jan 07, 2003 Posts: 18

Essentially sharing of fix to a hell of a hassle.

I posted a question some days ago about problems with my building computers for my clients. I have been using an Asus M2N-X Plus motherboard with AMD CPUs to great success. Very reliable and don’t come back and bite me in the bum. However I was having hassles with the video resolution returning to a very low resolution setting in seemingly a totally random manner. No one could help me until I finally stumbled upon a fix that worked.

Namely the Nvidia based video cards were the problem and as soon as I changed to ATI based Video card chipsets the problem was solved.

Fixes tried were
1) Changed from Asus cheap video card to an expensive Gigabyte one. Same problem.
2) Changed motherboard for another new one. Same problem.
3) Changed Ram memory. Same problem.
4) Changed power supply. Same problem.
5) Changed actual case. Same problem.
6) Rebuilt machine 3 times with Windows and hassles with Microsoft. Same problem.
7) Built another machine and same problem. Now seriously loosing hairs off my head.
Cool

Put in old PCI-E ATI card and problem fixed. Phew.
9) Changed both video cards and machines now sweet as.

End of sharing.

Werebo · Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 8:20 am Post subject:

Allo hcsvepa7 Smile

I'm sorry I couldn't help with your problem Sad

. I have a very similar setup - An Asus M2N4-SLI mobo with AMD 64 4200+ and 2 GB RAM, but my NVidia GEForce 8400 GS works like a charm

Did you install all the various mobo drivers supplied on the ASUS CD and set the BIOS to PCI-E video???

hcsvespa7 · Joined: Jan 07, 2003 Posts: 18

Hello again Werebo

Thanks for your post. Surely it could not be just that BBB bios change…..!!!!!

I have one of the machines running beside me and was able to access the bios and this is what I found.

Advanced Tab
Chipset Tab
Southbridge Configuration MCP61 Chipset.
Was set to
PCIE>PCI>IGP
Changed it to
IGP>PCI>PCIE

What I don’t know is if this simple bios change could have made the Nvidia 8500 card run correctly …!!! No card to try that with in this instance. My ATI card is still nice and stable and that will do me for the present.

With Respect to you Werebo from Henry

Werebo · Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:23 pm Post subject:

I assumed your graphics card was PCI-E, but the same would apply for AGP cards too. I can't say whether this caused your problem, but I've discovered from experience that having the BIOS set to the wrong video setting can cause some errrmmm.... 'interesting' faults Wink

.

I've now learnt to check the BIOS settings on a newly built PC, at first successful power-on - even before installing Windows.

Get the hardware bits talking to each other and the software has a common language to work with Laughing

goretsky

Hello,

I have seen similar problems when the supplemental power cable to the video card is not tightly connected.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky