Geforce4 Ti only working sometimes \ VOGONS

Geforce4 Ti only working sometimes

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First post, by YetAnother98dude

Posted on 2026-08-28, 21:02

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I have a Geforce4 Ti 4600 and a 4200. After the driver is installed (45.23)
both of them cause Windows 98 to freeze during or right after bootup. Most of the time it shows a black screen with nothing but the hourglass mouse symbol. Sometimes it goes into windows and locks up after a few seconds. On rare occasion, reinstalling the driver fixes the problem until the next few boot ups. Reinstalling Windows altogether results in the cards working as they should... well mostly. If I let my PC sit for a few hours it goes back to it's faulty behavior...

Obviously I really don't want to fiddle with drivers and Windows reinstalls everytime I want to play some games.
When the cards decide to work, they work perfectly fine. I can do gaming, running through benchmarks all day without any issues. But to get to that point, I have to persuade the damn thing for like 30 minutes to do anything. It's driving me crazy!

here is what I tried so far (without consistent results):
- using different driver versions
- removing all PCI and ISA cards
- visually checking for faulty components or bad solder joints
- changing graphics aperture size to 128MB in the BIOS

Reply 1 of 11, by Repo Man11

Posted on 2026-08-28, 22:14

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More information would help to give any meaningful advice. What motherboard and OS (98 FE or SE, motherboard drivers) etc.

A lot of times when you first start out on a project you think, This is never going to be finished. But then it is, and you think, Wow, it wasn't even worth it. - Jack Handey

Reply 2 of 11, by YetAnother98dude

Posted on 2026-08-29, 06:12

YetAnother98dude Offline

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Asus P2B-F, newest BIOS, Intel Chipset drivers 3.4, also tried newer ones but no difference
Pentium 3 Coppermine 1100/100
Windows 98 SE
120GB HDD

Reply 3 of 11, by agent_x007

Posted on 2026-08-29, 09:04

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Did you tried cleaning contact pads with alcohol ?

Reply 4 of 11, by YetAnother98dude

Posted on 2026-08-29, 12:35

YetAnother98dude Offline

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Just tried that, didn't work.

Reply 5 of 11, by allesclar

Posted on 2026-08-29, 14:38

allesclar Offline

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Have you tried a different PSU?

MSI MS6156/Pentium III 450Mhz/256MB SDR DRAM/GeForce Ti 4200/Sound Blaster PCI 128
Asrock K7S41GX/AMD Athlon XP 2400/512MB DDR DRAM/GeForce 6800/Sound Blaster Live 5.1
Asus P5K/Pentium E6600 2.40GHz/4GB DDR 2 DRAM/GeForce 8800GT/Sound Blaster Audigy 2

Reply 6 of 11, by Shponglefan

Posted on 2026-08-29, 15:30

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Have you tried testing these cards in a different system?

If you can test them with a different motherboard, it might narrow down whether it's a problem with the cards themselves or a problem with the specific setup.

Pentium 4 Multi-OS Build
486 DX4-100 with 6 sound cards
486 DX-33 with 5 sound cards

Reply 7 of 11, by butjer1010

Posted on 2026-08-29, 15:50

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allesclar wrote on 2026-08-29, 14:38:

Have you tried a different PSU?

My guess also would be the PSU....
But they need to be checked in another system....

Reply 8 of 11, by YetAnother98dude

Posted on 2026-08-29, 16:49

YetAnother98dude Offline

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I have now swapped the PSU to a modern 530w one and the system wouldn't even post. Then I changed back to the old PSU and again - not posting. It seems the P2B-F was on it's way out. 🙁
I have swapped the board with an MSI MS6151 I had lying around and now everything seems to be running just fine. But to be sure of that, the system needs to sit for a couple hours or a day when turned off.

Reply 9 of 11, by YetAnother98dude

Posted on 2026-08-30, 16:27

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Reporting back: with the new Motherboard, the system boots consistently and everything is stable! Only thing I've noticed is that POSTing takes much longer now, especially the memory test is super slow. I can skip it with esc but I wish there was an option to do that automatically.

Reply 10 of 11, by butjer1010

Posted on 2026-08-31, 10:14

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YetAnother98dude wrote on 2026-08-30, 16:27:

Reporting back: with the new Motherboard, the system boots consistently and everything is stable! Only thing I've noticed is that POSTing takes much longer now, especially the memory test is super slow. I can skip it with esc but I wish there was an option to do that automatically.

No option for "quick boot" in BIOS ?

Reply 11 of 11, by YetAnother98dude

Posted on 2026-08-31, 10:18

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It has the option, but it doesn't make a difference.
I made a separate thread about this problem:

POST takes long on MSI board

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