How do the power supply specs compare between the two systems you've tried it in?

Are you using the ALi AGP Driver?

Currently i use a 350w psu and the system the GF4 worked in before only had a 160w psu.

I did get a bit further meanwhile, when i disable the network card the geforce card seem to at least work and could even finish 3dmark2000 so maybe it is a power issue but not so much caused by the PSU but by the mainboard?

aaaaaaaaand offcourse while i'm typing this the system just decided to reset on its own.......... 😒

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Are you using the ALi AGP Driver?

I uninstalled it but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

Could be, hard to say. Next best guess is to swap the power supply, if you have another one available...

Cyrix200+ wrote:

Could be, hard to say. Next best guess is to swap the power supply, if you have another one available...

I can try to swap the power supply tomorrow but 350w should be enough for this card i think.

Oldtech81 wrote:

I can try to swap the power supply tomorrow but 350w should be enough for this card i think.

The MX460 wouldn't boot in my system with a 300W power supply, whereas a GeForce 2MX and a Voodoo Banshee worked fine.

I wouldn't rule out a power supply issue. You need enough beef on the +12V/+5V lines. My 300W supply only had 16A on those lines combined which wasn't enough. An MX460 would trip it and an MX440 would boot, but the supply put out a high pitched noise with it.

Since then I have switched to a 350W supply with 18A/12V and 32A/5V and now it works fine.

It's not about the total wattage, but unit efficiency and rail ratings. Yes, 350W ATX should be enough, but not to be ruled out.

Oldtech81 wrote:

I did get a bit further meanwhile, when i disable the network card the geforce card seem to at least work and could even finish 3dmark2000 so maybe it is a power issue but not so much caused by the PSU but by the mainboard?

Perhaps the network card shared the IRQ with the GeForce card? The graphics card should have its own, non-shared IRQ, otherwise you may get an unstable system. The AGP slot normally shares the IRQ with the first PCI slot.

derSammler wrote:

Oldtech81 wrote:

I did get a bit further meanwhile, when i disable the network card the geforce card seem to at least work and could even finish 3dmark2000 so maybe it is a power issue but not so much caused by the PSU but by the mainboard?

Perhaps the network card shared the IRQ with the GeForce card? The graphics card should have its own, non-shared IRQ, otherwise you may get an unstable system. The AGP slot normally shares the IRQ with the first PCI slot.

I removed the network card but unfortunately that didnt work either. I will try a different powersupply to see if that makes a difference.

Well it clearly wasn't the powersupply. I've hooked up a modern 650w (!) corsair PSU and at the very first test i throw at it... pc locks up.
I've never in my life had so much trouble getting a videocard to work, drives me crazy! I'm going to reinstall windows98 now and see if that works.

sometimes ss7 can be troublesome with certain cards, just grab another one.

I had the same issues with a Asus geforce2 Ti on my P5A, running any other card was fine and i benchmarked a lot of different cards (including Medion Geforce4 MX460). But that particular GF2 Ti did not run stable while it runs fine on other systems.

Alright, i've reinstalled windows, played around with even more bios settings and drivers but it still keeps crapping out on me so i removed the geforce card.
I wanted to test another videocard, an ati rage 128pro but that also freezes the system randomly! seriously wtf. Is my mainboard broken? Is there a setting i'm missing or were super socket 7 boards just picky pieces of crap? I never owned one back in the day, i went from socket 7 pentium 1 to 440LX pentium 2 to 440BX pentium 3 and those were all rock solid boards and even though i've had a lot of different videocards in them back then i never once had an issue with them.

I'm about to give up and put the voodoo3 back in there (which i was already planning on doing but i wanted to benchmark the other cards) but i hate giving up 😒

It will take some more thought. That IS the era where everything under the sun had a jumper. Maybe there's a "don't choke and crash on me" jumper. If you don't want to give up it's time to start investigating any log files or crash dumps. Run Dr Watson. Or try installing an older Linux and checking dmesg. Something with verbosity needs to be setup in the software environment on this machine.

Auzner wrote:

It will take some more thought. That IS the era where everything under the sun had a jumper. Maybe there's a "don't choke and crash on me" jumper. If you don't want to give up it's time to start investigating any log files or crash dumps. Run Dr Watson. Or try installing an older Linux and checking dmesg. Something with verbosity needs to be setup in the software environment on this machine.

Funny you say that, just checked every jumper setting on the board but everything is set up correctly. 😕

I can't see any logfiles or crash dumps because the system either resets or freezes ":(

Is there any specific reason you want that GeForce 4 MX on this build? A Voodoo3 is already more than enough to completely saturate the little K6 CPUs, unless you are trying to play:

a) at high resolutions (say 1280x1024 or 1600x1200)

b) games from 2000 and onwards (especially those making use of HW T&L which will benefit greatly I suppose on GeForce cards)

In every other case, the Voodoo3 will actually be somewhat faster than the GeForce 4 MX because of the lower driver overhead which frees up a tiny bit more CPU time that will allow all those severely CPU limited games to run just a little bit faster. Unless you are looking to benchmark or are going for a completely balls to the wall or very specific build, that Voodoo 3 will free you of a ton of headaches.

I wanted to just benchmark it and get back to the voodoo3 but i also noticed a pretty big difference in 2D acceleration using windows98. And since the rage 128 pro has the same sort of issues i want to get to the bottom of this. Also want to dive in direct3D games and the geforce seems more capable in that regard .
small update : I download the ALI APG utility and set things to 'normal' (AGP 1x mode) and also disabled AGP turbo mode in the bios and things t least don't randomly freeze but i still cant finish 3Dmark2001 for example.

Google "Asus P5A power issue" and there are 105k results which primarily discuss AGP problems back in 2000-2002. Looks like it may never work, the board has a design flaw and cannot provide proper in-spec power.

I have a P5A/k62 build planned in the next couple of months. I am filled with trepidation and excitement.

If you have solder and reflow equipment a weekend could be spent modding the board.