My GeForce 256 locks up in 3D accelerated programs (OpenGL & D3D). Please help.

[bmchenry]

I have an ATrend ATC6400 i440GX board and an Intel Pentium II Xeon 450 w/1MB cache. I was using Voodoo3 3000 and it worked great, but now I have switched to a Visiontek Geforce 256 and it locks up when I try to run any 3D accelerated programs almost immediately after they start. I am running Windows 2000 Pro and I have tried the 5.16 - 5.32 reference drivers and still have not been able to get it to work. I then swapped out my hard drive and installed Win98se and that locks up on my too. Does anybody have any suggestions? Thanks in advance for and responses

 

[IronMike]

I am trying to track down a similar problem myself. Many on this forum claim this is a power supply problem and recommend disconnecting as many devices as possible to see if it helps. Seems the GeForce cards are power hungry.

 

[HeaverVT]

I've got a 300W supply, that should be plenty, but mine still locks up consistantly as soon as I start a game. The irritating thing is, it worked perfect for a couple weeks when I first put it in - turned out I still had HPPT66 drivers from my BH6-r2 installed, and all the BX chipset drivers were still in the device manager. For some reason when I changed my soundcard drivers, my happy little ignorance-utopia came to an abrupt and heart-wrenching end. Anyhow - I still had a DVD decoder card in there, plus two extra fans were then plugged in (off now cause mt case is open) and it worked then, so it can't be this power supply. It's got to be something else.

 

[IronMike]

You might be interested in this article about cooling and the GeForce.

http://millisec.hypermart.net/GeforceII/GeforceR.htm

 

[bmchenry]

I am glad to hear that I am not the only one with this problem. Perhaps between all of us, we can figure out the cause.

I have a 300W PS also and I tried running a game with only the geforce in there and it still locked up. I don't think it is a heating issue because the card doesn't seem to get to hot. Although, perhaps that little fan on there draws more juice than the AGP port can supply. I still believe that this has to be a bios or driver related incident as I have a SS7 system with a K6-3 and a TNT1 card and it took me forever to get that thing working properly in games due to poor drivers and bioses. I am going to try a few other things before I stomp on this card. Anyways, please keep the suggestions coming.

 

[HeaverVT]

There's a thread over in the Motherboards forum that I think solves this (it did for me) I was using a single 256MB PC133 stick, and someone discovered that if they used two 64Mb PC100 sticks, their problems went away. So I tried adding another 256MB PC133 stick and voila! no morre hang ups. Timing ans Freq did not seem to be an issue, I think it's just having a single 256Stick (or maybe a single stick in general?)

Good luck

 

[P.O.W.]

Try setting you AGP aperature in your BIOS to 16 megs. I had a SDR that did the same thing. I had 128Megs of ram and the aperature was set to the recommended 1/2 of system ram. Everything worked except opengl and d3d. I set it to 16 megs and it both worked fine. If 16 does not work you may have to set it lower, but of course that disables the AGP.