I have emailed ASUS tech support. Maybe they can shed some light on this issue.

What's the problem that was occurring? No POST with the ATi card? Also, what's this about inferior antialising? 😀

What exactly are the symptoms that you're having? You just say that "it doesn't like it".

I've had problems with Radeon 9xxx boads on VIA chipset motherboards. Installing the latest VIA Hyperion 4-in-1 drivers and the latest ATI catalyst drivers helps. Also lowering the AGP from 8x to 4x and making sure that you're NOT overclocking (core speed, memory speed, AGP bus speed, etc.) will help. A decent power supply is also necessary when running an AMD+ATI combo.

I ended up getting an nForce2 motherboard and a Radeon 9800 and it works great.

Also I've heard that some VIA boards had problems with FastWrites and 8x AGP...so they'd run FastWrites turned off and in 4x mode. Been forever since I used a VIA mobo....bad experiences back in the day. Heard that they are pretty decent nowadays.....nowhere near Nforce tho.

As of a year or two ago, VIA still sucked in my opinion. They just make everything too cheap and then blame all the peripheral manufacturers (ATI, Creative, etc.) when people start having problems.

I will never own another VIA board. The nightmares I suffered through on my old VIA K5 board with PCI ethernet and Live! cards were enough to make me steer of VIA forever. I have had some issues with FastWrites and 8x AGP with my 9800 All-In-Wonder, too, even with my AMD chipset board.

Let me explain the problem.

The card would boot and Windows would start normally, but as soon as I change the videomode to anything beyond 640x480 the system hangs/restarts.

I have tried everything you have suggested.

+ Running microprocessor/memory at lowest speeds (no 1T command, nor interleaving either)
+ Forcing AGP4X in bios (Funny enough, all cards still thought they were running 8X)
+ disabling Fast Writes in bios
+ Installed latest 4.56 VIA Hyperion (no difference since I had 4.55vp1 already installed)
+ Uninstalled VIA Hyperion and used built-in AGP drivers (no difference)
+ Tried latest catalyst 5.4

The odd thing is that this card worked flawlessly on my old (VIA also) A7V333. And with the same power supply (I have no PCI cards installed so the system must be running fine). I have also remember I flashed my old A7V333 eight times and you needed some bios upgrade to get ATi cards working. Maybe this new A7V600-X is suffering from a similar issue.

As for "bad antialias" I mean my ATi Radeon had an overall better image quality than my current GF FX 5700LE. I have tested some games and my fps has also overall decreased. Half Life 2 runs slightly smoother (even if hardware test shows otherwise in fps), but Doom3 runs like crap (30fps using lowest quality settings and 640x480). I remember to have run it quite well with the ATi card at 1024x768
Both cards are in the mid-low range and both have 256MB.

well, I have been playing Doom3 this morning. To be totally honest, it is PLAYABLE at 800x600 but it isn't fast.

On the other hand, I find the inability of use VESA modes beyond 640x480 (it seems a mark from nVIDIA) quite disturbing. I still have several ms-dos proggies that use VESA. 😒 😠

Doesn't VGAFIX fix the NTVDM VESA limitation for NVIDIA cards?

I really haven't tested it with NVIDIA cards since I've been using ATI since the 9700 first came out and my VESA games work great with my X800 which unlike my 9700 actually has VESA 3.0! YAY! About time ATI! Only what? uhhh 6 years too late or something? heh.

the only time I had a problem like that (windows crashing if you set it higher then 640x480x256) was when the video card wasn't totally inserted correctly in the AGP slot. (what ever the reason).

Yes, I thought about that too, but I have inserted/reinserted the card at least ten times. Otherwise, still waiting for ASUS to answer my tech inquiry.

Another thing that surprise me is that I initially set up AGP in bios to AGP4X maximum, but both cards insisted in reporting they were running at 8X speed. I have also reported this to ASUS. I think it may be a bug in bios.

DosFreak wrote:

Doesn't VGAFIX fix the NTVDM VESA limitation for NVIDIA cards?

I remember to have played with it sometime when I was still using my GeForce4 Ti4200. It didn't work for me. Made my Windows XP lockup instantly.

PS. ATi supporting VESA 3.0 via bios at last? That's good news! "Better late than never" as the old saying goes...

PS2. I WANT MY ATI BACK!!!!!!!!! ASUS bastards..... 😢

PS3. Hmmmm. Those X800 cards sound real real NICE. They are quite expensive but I wouldn't mind getting one. I am sure I will notice a good fps increase with my Sempron 3000+ or maybe not. Here in Spain they are priced about 380-500€ plus VAT (Wow! that hurts) depending on manufacturer.

It seems ASUS technical support suxx big time. They redirected my message to this LINK - Well, are they stupid or what? I already stated on my query that I have tried the Catalyst 5.40 - It seems I am out of luck for now.

This weekend I am going to lend my Radeon 9600 to a friend with a Soltek board which has another Radeon 9600 installed. Just to check whether the card might be broken or not.

PS - Also tried Catalyst 4.5 and 5.3 - Same results.

Checking certain forums (Google is your friend), I have noticed there are LOTS of people having the same problem as me. The problems seems to be related to AMD microprocessors newer than Athlon XP. It affects Semprons and AMDs 64.

In the end, I grew tired of pitting VIA against compatibility so I purchased another mainboard, this one based on nVIDIA nFORCE2 chipset (ABIT NF7). I hope it will work well. 😏

Ah, welcome to the nForce2 club 😀

IMO, the Nforce 2 is the best mobo I've ever had.

Mobo's personally owned by me (not counting Parent's)

Soyo SY5EMA (K63-400)
Abit BE6 (Don't remember....700mhz P3??)
Abit VP6 (Dual P3 1GHZ!!!!)
ABIT KR7A (Some XP varian...1800?)
Asus A78NX (XP 2800+ Nforce 2)

Not sure what the next mobo will be, it'll be AMD multi-core but I want to have full linux compatibility so we'll see....

You should try some other brands in the future to round out your experience. I'd recommend trying Gigabyte and _maybe_ MSI. I need to try Abit and a few others...

Based on past experience I wouldn't recommend Gigabyte nor MSI. Although MSI seems to have gotten better, and their problems were almost exclusively isolated to bad capacitors from a dishonest supplier in the past.