First post, by sardinesandwich
Hi, been lurking for awhile but this is my first post here 😀
Picked up an old system for really cheap -
AOpen AK73 Pro with the latest official bios (1.20) (side note - I did find an old archived Japanese blog with a modified ak73pro bios that adds support for some newer socket A cpus up to barton which I can translate and post here if people are interested)
Matrox G450
AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1000mhz
431w Enermax PSU
512mb SD Ram
Wanted to use it for late 90s/early 2000s games so I figured I'd put a better GPU in it. Picked up a Radeon 9600xt and have been having some weird stability issues.
Basically, the system will randomly lock up entirely when trying to use the card for 3d work. Sometimes it works without any issue, but other times the entire system will freeze onto a still image. Have the Via 4in1 chipset drivers (4.43) installed, have experimented with different video card drivers and operating systems, (2k, 98 se, xp). XP was the most stable, but still had the same issue. I've also experimented with the AGP settings and a bunch of other things in the bios with no luck.
Have tried both openGL and direct3d, and I don't have any issues with UT running at 800x600. If I bump the resolution up higher sometimes it works and sometimes the system locks up. Quake 3 will lock up the system on the main menu.
The card has no issues in non gaming uses. The system did lock up in the same way a couple of times with the matrox card (once when installing drivers and once just after idling for about 20 mins or so)
I have come across many threads from the early 2000s about people having some issues with the KT133 chip and R300 cards, but couldn't find any fixes.
Caps on the boards look okay. The board does have a weird issue when the g450 is in it where it won't post on the first boot. It needs to be reset to boot. With the 9600xt the computer will post without any issues every time.
Any ideas?
Thanks