VOGONS


First post, by Iris4g

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Yes the silly title is true! As I sit here writing this at 1am I'm at a complete loss. My ECS P4M800PRO-M2 REFUSES to do any hardware acceleration with ATi cards X1X and under. Somehow the 2600XT and HD3850 I tested work but anything under that I will get constant BSOD (no errors either. A literal blue screen with no text) or applications will crash to desktop as soon as hardware acceleration is required.

The kicker to this is that nvidia cards work perfectly fine. Absolutely NO issues what so ever.

I have tried:
-tons of catalyst drivers
-re installing windows XP 32 and 64
-using windows vista x64 (better results but eventually exact same pure blue BSOD I mentioned)
-catalyst omega
-loading BIOS optimal defaults (oddly enough AGP voltage is set to +0.05, I set it to "normal" to no avail)

Every ATi card that refused to work in the ECS system works perfectly fine on my asrock 4core dual sata2 system with windows 7 x64 and WDM drivers.

The weirdest thing is the more powerful the ATi card, the less stable it is. My 9550 will run for quite a while before crashing in games. My 9700TX instantly crashes to desktop or BSOD when launching games.

So with all of that said does anyone have any suggestions...? Is it a secret BIOS setting? Have you even heard of a motherboard that is incapable of running ATi gpus?!

Reply 1 of 6, by pii_legacy

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You may just have to accept it isn't meant to be.

I used to have a Compaq OEM machine which would NOT run a certain range of nVidia cards with ANY driver installed, no matter what I did and how hard I tried, or how many versions and setup exe's I hacked, it just would. not. happen. I actually got a different problematic card on it to run correctly after finding and fixing some bad caps, but that's rare that a component swap makes something like this happen.

I also have an Intel slot 1 motherboard that pretends any VIA or NEC brand USB card isn't there at all, when the card works in every other machine I have.

Reply 2 of 6, by shamino

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To avoid losing sight of other possible explanations, can you list exactly which cards you tried and how well or badly they worked?
One thing that comes to mind is power requirements of the different cards.
Are you able to test voltages with a multimeter? I'm especially curious if your 5V supply is collapsing under load.

Reply 3 of 6, by Iris4g

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shamino wrote on 2020-07-04, 05:25:

To avoid losing sight of other possible explanations, can you list exactly which cards you tried and how well or badly they worked?
One thing that comes to mind is power requirements of the different cards.
Are you able to test voltages with a multimeter? I'm especially curious if your 5V supply is collapsing under load.

I have tried:
-Sapphire Radeon 9550 (worked for a while)
-Radeon 9600 Pro 128mb (Ref card, works for about a minute or less)
-Radeon 9700TX (Ref card with bios mod to 9700 non pro, doesn't work period-- bsod or app crash when launching games)
-FireGL X3-256MB (same as 9700TX)
-Sapphire Radeon X1600 Pro Advantage (OC BIOS mod 600 core, 450 mem, even with stock 500 core 293mem it's the same story as the 9700TX)
-Sapphire Radeon X1950GT (worked actually OK for a while but would get random crashes from time to time)

^^They all had issues of some sort. Tested every single one in my ASRock board and they perform flawlessly.

What did work with the ECS board?
-Sapphire HD2600XT
-Sapphire HD3850
-HIS HD4670
-Sapphire Radeon 9200 (128bit ver)

I don't have a multi-meter- but i have another PSU I could try. Current one in ECS system is an Antec Earthwatts 500W. I have a 500W cooler master from about the same year that I know for a fact ran almost all of these cards in a gigabyte motherboard with no problem. I will give it a try and see if it makes a difference.

Reply 6 of 6, by Iris4g

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candle_86 wrote on 2020-07-06, 16:39:

Turn off agp features, sideband addressing and fast writes. I bet ECS has them on by default.

I believe I looked for at least fast writes and there was no option to enable/disable in the BIOS.
I know for a fact that I have fastwrites enabled on my ASRock board.