Going from ATI to Nvidia

[jpetermann]

Ok, I learned my lesson. I wanted to try an 8500 out, and I did. It was actually not a bad card, but I did have some driver issues (imagine that).

I am now having a difficult time getting my new Gainward Geforce 4 Ti 4400 installed properly. I delete everything I can thing of and follow the uninstall proceedure that I found on Rage3D, put the new GF4 in, boot it up, and all I get is a bunck of garbage! I move my mouse and it rips the screen apart.

I tried booting into safe mode and installing the drivers. They installed, but when I booted up, the system works for about 10 seconds and then freezes on me.

I really do not want to reformat and start over, so PLEASE! Someone help me if you can. I have learned my lesson! I promise! I will never do ATI again.

My system:
Gigabyte 7vrxp
Athlon XP 1800
512mb crucial ddr
Win XP pro
SBlaster Audigy Platinum
Hopefully a gforce 4

 

[LuDaCriS66]

Ever thought maybe the problem is with the GF4 card? Does it give you all the garbage right when you turn the computer or when it reaches the desktop?

 

[jpetermann]

It doesn't do it until I get to the desktop. This is also my 3rd gf 4. 2 were PNY, and I thought they were just bad, but now I am beginning to wonder. Thanks for your help.

 

[A5]

I went from a Radeon LE to a GF3 Ti200...about to return the damn thing because of the dreaded 'infinite loop' bug, especially since it looks like there is no fix coming down the pipe...

 

[LuDaCriS66]

Hmmm, thats weird. Did you set your adapter to standard vga before you stuck the GF4 in? Do you have WinXP installed on a partition separate from your other files? Cuz if you did, it wouldn't be a big deal to just reinstall it if you backup whatever you need to.

 

[jpetermann]

I did not set it to standard vga. I have all my files on the same drive in a raid 0 setup... thanks.

 

[Rand]

<< I went from a Radeon LE to a GF3 Ti200...about to return the damn thing because of the dreaded 'infinite loop' bug, especially since it looks like there is no fix coming down the pipe... >>



Just out of curiosity, what are you going to choose in place of the Ti200?
I would presume the R8500, as your evidently displeased by the rampant infinite loop issues so frequently associated with nVidia.

PastorJay- have you checked the registry for any remaining references to ATi's drivers?
Also, did the GF3 work in your system prior to your trial run with the R8500?

 

[nemesismk2]

Check your motherboard bios to see if "assign irq to vga" is disabled, if it is enable it!

 

[LarryJoe]

You also might want to try rolling the driver back or even better, restoring system settings to before you had the ATI card installed. This might not be possible as I don't know how far back you can do a restore. This will not effect the applications installed.

Say you installed the ATI on 1/15/02, restore to 1/14/02. This should clear out any of the ATI drivers. Your problem does sound like a hardware conflict, so you also may want to try pulling every non-essential card out of the system and then installing the GF4. Like the soundcard, modem, nic, etc.

I feel for you, ATI developes crappy drivers and horrible uninstall routines.

 

[Mem]

It does sound like some old ATI drivers are still in your system ,anyway you can also try WinXP repair and see if that helps,in the end you may need to reformat and do a clean install if you can`t get it working,btw for the record I`ve never had any nvidia loop errors with the 28.32 drivers,I had it twice with the 23.11 drivers also there`ve been some ATi user that have had loop errors as well so it`s not 100% Nvidia more 95% or so.

Few bios tweaks like disable all video shadowing,fastwrites and disable system bios cacheable will not do any harm for your video card and gaming as well.

 

[Wolfsraider]

<< I feel for you, ATI developes crappy drivers and horrible uninstall routines. >>

:Q

maybe he is having so much trouble because he is trying to do the swap video card thingy without a clean install as it was mentioned he had problems with both ati and nividia,ya think?

since i own ati 3 video cards and nvidia 1 video card i find it best to do a clean install before installing a video card to avoid such problems

and i used to think ati's drivers were bad and i've had bad ones but that was two years ago and since i figured out the clean install route i have no READ zero problems with ati and ymmv especially with new products but too many people not having trouble with both cards says something don't you think

end rant

peace

wolfsraider

 

[LarryJoe]

Whatever works for ya bud, don't ya think?

Lazy, impatient, paranoid and less than expert people wipe their hard drives clean as the first resort when changing something as simple as a video card. It should be a last resort. I haven't come accross a problem that I couldn't resolve with a little patience and research.

That said, a lot folks here on these forums do nothing constructive with their rig and just run 3Dmark and jump up and down about great Sandra scores, so formatting is no big deal.

 

[jpetermann]

A little update...

I brought the card to work this AM and put it in puter here. The thing works perfect, so I know it is not the video card. I have an older computer with an slot Athlon 700 in the box. My machine at home is lightyears beyond this!!!

Anyways, I can only assume that:
1. The AGP is bad on the motherboard. Why do I say this? Don't know, it is just a possibility, though
not very likely.

2. A conflict with something else on the board. I am wondering if my Sblaster audigy is the problem. It
is the only other pci card that I have.

3. A complete driver uninstall issue. Though I tried last night to do a clean install on a spare drive and
still had problems.

4. Something in my bios is not set right. I will have to check that when I get home.

I hate this. I wish it would just all work right from the start.

 

[Wolfsraider]

yep larry joe your right but back ups and a second harddrive alieviate my stress over doing something right the first time

but to each his own

 

[BFG10K]

I went from a Radeon LE to a GF3 Ti200...about to return the damn thing because of the dreaded 'infinite loop' bug, especially since it looks like there is no fix coming down the pipe...

If you didn't remove all traces of your ATi card (AKA reformat) then it's extremely likely that the leftover junks is causing problems. I've seen a case where a swap from an ATi card to an nVidia board caused infinite loop problems, problems which vanished after a clean install.

 

[earthman]

Why not just delete the windows partition and not lose all your data? Or just delete the startup files and the registry files and then reinstall. There's no need to wipe out the whole drive.

 

[Instagib]

Time to reformat

 

[mooseAndSquirrel]

try the rage3d site and look for tools to help clean out the registry. ATI vid drivers really wrap themselves around the spine of your system and are very hard to get rid of.

Once you get things working, follow the above advice and create restore points. After a lot of config work it's also a good idea to Ghost or otherwise backup your boot partition.

 

[Merlin]

No need to reformat. Just choose new installation, pick the same directory, and the windows installer will ask you if you want to delete the current installation. It will then delete just the windows directory and associated system files. Your documents and settings folder will go into a newly named folder under the documents and settings (e.g. administrator.XXXXXX instead of administrator where XXXXXX is the name of the computer). Once done, you can copy your old data from your old documents and settings user folder to the new one and delete the old one. Then, the only bad part is you have to re-install all the programs you use, so they can be re-registered in the registry. You will also have to re-install all the drivers for any additional devices you have that are not plug and play. I always have a folder on my HD that haves drivers for all my hardware on it, works like a charm. Have to re-install windows occasionally (for example when i get a new mobo), but never have to reformat

 

[Merlin]

By the way, I recently went from a GF2 Pro to a Ti 4400, which had some hardware conflicts with my mobo's (msi k7t 266 pro-2 ru) raid controller and scsi controller (adaptec 19160). It was really weird, with the 4400, it would not see my scsi card, no matter which slot it was in if the raid controller was enabled. With the raid controller disabled, it worked find...very weird. Anyway, I had some driver issues with the 8500 at first, but then I used the Omega drivers (www.rage3d.com), downloaded a patch for half-life, installed the refresh fix patch and set up powerstrip and have absolutely NO more problems. The thing works like a DREAM now. The overall image quality is better than the GF4 ti 4400, although it is not quite as fast. But for me, there is no benefit to running things at 100 FPS instead of 80 since my monitor only does 75 Hz at 1280x1024. I can run most games with AA enabled at 2x and still get 80+ FPS. It drops down a bit when I bump it up to 4 or 6X, but overall, the picture quality is phenomenal.

 

[CaiNaM]

heh.. that's weird... I just went from and 8500 to gf4 and like it just fine... it's just amazing to keep hearing about the overall image quality difference. guess I am just blind... tho I did adjust stuff for about 2 min once the gf4 was installed.

as for the install problems, i just went into add/remove programs, uninstalled radeon drivers and tweakers, shutdown, popped in my gf4, restarted. installed new drivers, restart again, and whala! everything works just fine.

nice thing is that I haven't had to relog in daoc from texture corruption and/or video lag as I did with the 8500, and don't get near the slowdowns during big battles that I used to.

to each their own, I guess.. but for me the gf4 works great, IQ is fine, and have yet to have any issues in any games. I must say the fsaa rocks. much faster than my 8500, and it actually has run in all games without issues (something I couldn't do with smoothvision). dungeon seige would not run with smoothvision.. works fine with fsaa on the gf4.

q3 team a runs sweet with 2xfsaa, and the framerates are better than the 8500 w/o fsaa - oh, and bfg: no more workaround for the dxtc issue =). by the way, how have you been?