xpladv570 wrote on 2022-02-24, 20:37:

Hello. […]
Show full quote

Hello.

I have a rather odd issue with one of my AGP cards, this is not something I have encountered before.

I tried to pair this card with my P4P800 P4 3,0 ghz system. When i turn on the machine, i get video output. However, the output seems to be stuck and frozen at the very first frame the computer outputs to the graphics card. In this case, its the BIOS POST screen. Mind you, the computer does not freeze. In fact, it continues booting all the way to the operating system. But the image never changes, even if i try switching between digital and analog cables.

When a card is defective, it usually does not output any image, prevents the computer from posting, signal gets cut off or the image is garbled with artifacts. Which is why this issue I encounter strikes me as really odd. I am "lucky" enough to be drowning in pentium 4 systems so i tried the card across multiple systems but I encounter the same exact issue.

I have also tried to "reflash" the VBIOS with ATIflash 3.10. Card seems to be detected just fine, though curiously ATIflash lists the Rialto chip as a separate graphics adapter. Trying to boot Linux liveCD also does not seem to work, for whatever reason i get a lot of CPU halts and other weird timeouts.

I am quite close to writing this card off but maybe someone here has encountered something similar or even better a solution. Every comment is appreciated.

I don't have a solution, I can't remember having ever encountered this exact issue. Closest thing I ever encountered was a graphics card that would not display anything at all, but the rest of the system would still continue powering up.

I have very little experience with linux, but perhaps the error messages might give some clues as to what is going on?
Other than that, only thing I could think of is to add a second graphics card (some cheap PCI card) and use that to try and gain more information from within Windows as to what might be going wrong with your X800XL.

I'm definitely curious to know what the issue might be. It may have something to do with the bridge chip? But that's just guesswork from my end.

Thanks for responding. Bridge chip would be my guess as well, as this seems like a case where hardware has an issue communicating after some point. Although why it would be able to output a frame and then stop responding is beyond me. I am tempted to put it in the oven because maybe its a loose solder joint somewhere - and the Rialto is known for being toasty. I'd like to think this is something stupid. I wonder if the Rialto BIOS can be re-flashed? If this is even a thing, and not some weird ATIflash bug.

It would be interesting to see what Windows thinks about the card and if the card will be able to take drivers. I should try this when i get some more time. I haven't had much luck with Linux, as it either seems to get stuck in a CPU halt loop (as in, it keeps waiting for some process to respond, times out, repeats ad infinitum). At the start it does mention that it cannot communicate with the "AMD" adapter but the message is so brief i cant quite make it out. This is of course with a PCI card as primary video adapter.

I remember years ago a friend had a kinda similar issue with a geforce 7800 ago card. It would display normally for 15-20 seconds then would either have the image freeze on what whatever was last displayed or go black. We noticed the bridge chip got incredibly hot and the card started acting up. We added a small heatsink to the chip and made sure there was airflow over the area and the card worked perfect after that. I don't know it that will help you but it couldn't hurt to try. These bridge chips were finicky creatures back in the day and could cause a whole host of issues.