First post, by xpladv570
I am in a posession of a couple of FX5200 PCI cards (both 128bit, one of which has severely downclocked memory) that for some mysterious reason do not work with older drivers, like the 45.23. They reliably work with driver 6x.xx and above. Older drivers do detect the cards as FX5200, but upon reboot in win98 I am greeted with a black screen.
Meanwhile, my FX 5500 PCI seems to be working fine after altering the NVAML.inf file. However that card is one of these chinese ebay specials that I am not too fond of using. I wondered what could be the reason for this incompatibility. After dumping the BIOS of both of my FX5200 I noticed that the BIOS version (04.34.20.87.00) is higher than other FX5200 AGP BIOS that I encounter. Also, the BIOS date for each of these cards is 2006 and 2007 respectively.
Could the BIOS of these cards be the reason, why they refuse to work with the older drivers? These cards are pretty useless to me if they cant run 45.23 or 42.45. Too many bugs with the newer versions (which I did encounter). Is there a kind soul that can dump their FX5200 128bit 128/256MB PCI BIOS? Or perhaps the solution lies elsewhere?