Originally posted by: bigkibby
Hello forum,
I would like your ideas on a little problem I have come across. I have this board with the 1.9a bios update, did that yesterday finally! In there also are a celeron 420 at 2.13(266 bus setting), 2 gigs HP DDR667(D-9 microns at 4-4-4-12), 6800 AGP, Ultra 550 watt PS, a pair of disk drives, and a couple ata hard drives. Things have been running pretty well, all things considered(had the usual BSOD's dialing it in to the sweet spot). No mods.
Last week I couldn't resist buying myself a new G92 based 8800 GS at *ew*gg for 99 bucks. I tried it in my main gaming rig, Gigabyte with E6420, and I was blown away at how close it benched to my 8800GTS 640. Seeing others have had some success with powerful new PCIE X16 cards on this MB, I figured I would give it a try.
PHOOOEY no luck!!! machine would not post. Lights come on, fan on card spins, everything seems to be fine but no sweet sounding "beep" and flash screen, nada. Any way, after reseating the card 3 or 4 times I gave up and put the AGP back in. All good again.
Next I try a X1950 pro PCIE in the slot and Bingo it fires up. This card is a power hog, so that rules out the power supply being the issue on the non start for the 8800GS. I did not load the ati drivers, as that card will not be in there long. It was a test for the PCIE slot on the board. I was bushed and went to bed.
Does anyone have any ideas why the new 8800GS would not post on the Asrock? I had it workin on 2 other machines just fine. The Gigabyte p965 mentioned earlier, and an old DFI 754 board with PCIE.
Thanks in advance, have a good one. bigkibby
Just like for G92 based 8800GT 512Mb PCI-E Gen 2 cards, your G92 based 8800GS 384Mb PCI-E Gen 2 vga card is not compatible with any PCI-E Gen 1 mobo which uses a VIA chipset!
A original solution for the 8800gt was to flash the card with what was at that time called a "GEN1" bios ----> Which was in fact just a "hacked" standard bios. Unfortunately this "GEN1" bios solution did not work for all manufacturers versions of 8800gt, so was not considered a real solution to the problem. Fortunately however, EVGA soon after provided "proper (62.92.24.00.xx series)" updated bioses which work with ALL versions of 8800gt ---> in other words, after flashing with a new EVGA bios, your 8800gt will work in ANY mobo, PCI-E Gen 1 or 2.
Since I don't believe there are any hacked "Gen1" bioses for a 8800GS, the proper, and maybe only, solution to your current 8800gs problem is for a 8800gs manufacturer to provide a updated "PCI-E 1/2 compatible" bios ?
EDIT:
A glimmer of hope may however lie in the fact that a 8800GS is essentially just a cut down version of a 8800GT ---> ie, fewer stream processors, less memory; and running at lower speads ?
And to prove this "theory", I flashed my Palit 8800gt Sonic 512Mb with EVGA and XFX 8800GS bioses (62.92.1F.00.28 and 62.92.1F.00.00) and had no problems booting and loading into windows with driver 174.88 as a 8800GS ---> where Rivatuner indicated the card as a 8800gs with 112 sp; see example below:-
$ffffffffff Display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0000000000 Description : NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS
$0000000001 Vendor ID : 10de (NVIDIA)
$0000000002 Device ID : 0616
$0000000003 Location : bus 1, device 0, function 0
$0000000004 Bus type : PCIE
$000000000f PCIE link width : 16x supported, 16x selected
$0000000009 Base address 0 : fa000000 (memory range)
$000000000a Base address 1 : c0000000 (memory range)
$000000000b Base address 2 : none
$000000000c Base address 3 : f8000000 (memory range)
$000000000d Base address 4 : none
$000000000e Base address 5 : 00009c00 (I/O range)
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$ffffffffff NVIDIA specific display adapter information
$ffffffffff ----------------------------------------------------------------
$0100000000 Graphics core : G92 revision A2 (112sp)
$0100000001 Hardwired ID : 0610 (ROM strapped to 0616)
$0100000002 Memory bus : 256-bit
$0100000003 Memory type : DDR3 (RAM configuration 00)
$0100000004 Memory amount : 524288KB
$0100000100 Core clock domain 0 : 583.200MHz
$0100000101 Core clock domain 1 : 1458.000MHz
$0100000006 Memory clock : 702.000MHz (1404.000MHz effective)
So, if a 8800GT can be flashed and run ok with a 8800GS bios, then why shouldn't it also be possible for a 8800GS to be flashed and run with a 8800GT bios ?
Meaning, theoretically, a "interim" solution could be for example to flash your 8800GS with one of the EVGA updated 8800GT bioses (eg, 62.92.24.00.02) ?
Of course, anyone considering this particular interim solution, at the very least must remember to change the EVGA 8800gt bios's speads to the same as those in the original 8800GS bios ----> otherwise the much higher 8800gt bios speeds will likely cause artifacts/lockups when windows tries to load the nvidia driver !