9646gt wrote:

Nvidia Geforce 3 ti200 (actually an Asus v8200t2 deluxe) that is overclocked to 230mhz CPU and 525MHz Memory.

Maybe powering off the monitor (which the video card must respond to) and the associated power management events that take place is what demonstrates the 230/525 overclock isn't stable. Return to stock clocks and see what happens-- if it's fine, then start slowly incrementing upwards.

Outside clocks I would blame the nVidia drivers, the last ones are very buggy. The card you have will work with older ones and likely has improved performance too with them.

Tiido wrote:

Outside clocks I would blame the nVidia drivers, the last ones are very buggy. The card you have will work with older ones and likely has improved performance too with them.

That is a good point-- back then, the *latest* drivers didn't always prove to be *best*, although when it's the final release of a driver it *should* be at least more stable than predecessors.

I'm still thinking it's the physical layer-- the card is overclocked. I'd be sure it worked at the manufacturer's baseline specs before trying to overclock it.

I've had this symptom with a Geforce2 in Me way back in 2000 (switching to text mode would be fatal, be it BSODs or alt-entering a prompt - but sometimes) so I doubt driver age would matter much.

Thanks for the reply guys. It happens without overclocking on a fresh install with just the drivers installed for everything. I determined the card is a bit overkill for the CPU/build and Nvidia cards seem to be not play well with EA games like the Need For Speed series for me so far. I ordered a Radeon 7500 and will probably just through this Asus v8200t2 deluxe up on eBay once I do some testing.

I have a similar HP 4450 system with this same motherboard. I fought it for days trying to get anything outside of a Voodoo 3 AGP or old S3 AGP card working reliably. Finally came up with a solution to get my TNT2 Pro 16MB working in this system as I figure this is a good match for a Celeron 533MHz and limited 66MHz FSB...after about giving up. Most everything I tried originally would result in booting to a flashing green cursor in the top left corner or game/desktop lockups.

First I used Flashrom 0.9.8 DOS to erase the HP Phoenix BIOS and flash in the Asus beta Award BIOS for this board. I then rebooted and used Asus aflash and reflashed the Asus BIOS again just to be sure. Then after lots of struggling I figured out AGP aperture has to be set at exactly 16MB, the 12.41 drivers must be used, and using Rivatuner I forced AGP mode from 2X to 1X and sideband/fast-writes off. The system is now very stable running Windows 98 SE and I have been playing through System Shock 2 and Half-Life with no problems. Quake III benches at about 48fps 800x600 high settings (16-bit textures and colors)....so CPU limited. Hope this helps.

Im gonna try a Geforce 2 MX200 in this system next and see if that works as I can use the same 12.41 drivers. I kinda doubt newer drivers will work, based on my previous experiences.