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Friday, November 19, 2004

It's all in the BIOS, mostly....
The brass-bound oaken doors of the Lab of Doom and Pepsi Cola reverberated from the continue onslaught of equipment thrown at them --from the inside of course. After two Gigabyte motherboards failed miserably, both with PFN_LIST_CORRUPT errors, I'd installed an ASUS K8V SE Deluxe ("The King of AMD Athlon 64 MBs") board and upgraded the video capture system from a somewhat pathetic ATI All in Wonder 9000 Pro to a Hauppauge WinTV PVR250 and nVidia Ti4200 graphics card. I also boosted the memory up to Crucial's more robust Ballistix memory. No more PFN_LIST_CORRUPT message! Excellent!

Maybe not. Soon after attempting to either capture or render video, the bloody system makes up its own mind to reboot randomly. Argghhhh! Tried a variety of aged nVidia drivers. No luck. Wiped them, pulled the Ti4200, replaced it with a FX5200. Wait, there's no driver disk in this box... There's no user manual either... DAMN PC Warehouse!!!! I don't know what's going on with its Internet sales, but the two New Jersey stores "in my neighborhood" are total crap.

Download the drivers from eVGA.com. Install them. Try rendering. Reboot! Argghhh, Part 2!!!

Google "ASUS nVidia." Seems there was a problem with one of its earlier motherboards and nVidia FX graphics cards. But that MB also used the VIA K8T800 chipset. Great... The solution suggested is to downgrade the BIOS to 1007... What do I have...? 1001...! Well, it's a different motherboard... Newest is 1004... Oh, and don't use the ASUS auto upgrade software. Use the DOS-based AFUDOS loader. I love life...

By the time the BIOS has been upgraded there's a pile of several old motherboards, a few DVD players, a CD burner or three, and a laser disc player sitting on the floor at the base of the doors.

Render......... It worked! Great!! Problem solv.... Nope. Third render gets me a reboot!!

I'm seriously about to retire this system when an H4 bulb goes off in my brain. (I upgraded from incandescent years ago.) Back to ASUS, downloaded the 4-in-1 driver. It's not very new, but, if the BIOS was 1001, it's probably newer than what I have.

Installed. Render, render, render, render, render, render, render (don't ya just love 'cut and paste'), then capture, capture, capture, capture, capture.... Not a problem. System's been running fine for several days now. See? Everything has a solution. It's all about having enough gear on hand to throw at the doors until you find it.

# Permalink Posted at 6:53 PM 15 comments Email this Link

Comments on this Item:

hey bill,

you upgraded an ati 9000 to a Ti4200, and replaced that with a FX5200? com'on bill! how about a real upgrade to a x800 or a 6800? those two graphic boards are more than 2 years old!

there is some kind of problem with the e blogger post a comment. i signed on but every time i try to post a comment the stupid thing won't remember my password.

rainman

# posted by Anonymous 12:36 PM

Two forces are represented here:

1. My game repetoire is fairly limited, so my desire for a $400+ graphics card is non-existent.

2. The real difference between a Ti4200 and an X800 is that the Ti4200 can display game action 2.5x faster than I (or any human) can actually play a game while the X800 can do it roughly 5x. There are some subtleties in shading, polygons, and the like, but, basically, the X800 is a card that gets better benchmark scores, not one that necessarily performs better from a human point of view.

# posted by Bill 2:49 PM

That's true unless you're playing games like Halflife 2 in which case even your X800 is going to be choking. But if all you're playing is Railroad Tycoon you're more than safe with pretty much any card.

# posted by David 9:08 AM

With Railroad Tycoon? Even integrated "graphics" works then. My favorite is Dino Tycoon though, great game.

# posted by Cyrus 9:54 AM

Personally, I'm hooked on tetris....

# posted by Bill 10:59 AM

That explains the no new postings :). I remember many a time skipping homework to play tetris.

# posted by Cyrus 1:00 PM

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the X800 a PCI-E part? Ergo, you couldn't use it on an AGP mobo anyway.

# posted by Anonymous 6:31 AM

Nope, the X800 is a native AGP part. There are more AGP X800's than PCI-Express ones that I've seen. I'm running a Built-By-ATI Radeon X800Pro 256MB VIVO card on AGP.

# posted by David 7:07 AM

So now you know the proper sequence for all AMD based systems:

1. format HD/load OS (got a floppydrive for that SATA HD?)
2. load latest BIOS
3. load latest 4in1's
4. load latest video driver
5. load whatever else is left in whatever order you want

granted this can get complicated if your OS doesn't recognize your internet device.

# posted by WRM 7:41 AM

Laserdisk?!? I'd love to see the data transfer rates on that! Didja have this daisy-chained off your parallel scanner or is this a serial device?

# posted by Dean 8:33 AM

You're close but it's really:

1. format HD/load OS from CD
2. load 4in1's from CD
3. load LAN driver from CD
4. download and install latest video driver
5. downlaod and install all new Windows components
6. download and install new BIOS
7. download and install all new MB drivers
8. Start over to find cause of problem....

Dean - two of my three laser disk players are (gasp) stand-alone. One has an IEEE-488 interface. Shame I threw out my Commodore Pet a few years ago...

# posted by Bill 12:47 PM

You can lead 'em to water, but...

# posted by WRM 3:52 PM

You can lead 'em to water, but...

# posted by WRM 3:52 PM

This is how I prefer to set up my AMD-based systems (ie, all of my systems:-P):

1) Use an nVidia chipset instead of VIA
2) Download the latest Unified drivers for the motherboard
3) Download the latest graphics card driver
4) Put these on a CD
5) Install Windows
6) Install Unified nVidia drivers from burned CD (minus the IDE driver)
7) Install graphics card driver from the burned CD
8) Done.

I have heard bad things about Gigabyte's boards recently (bad quality control and compatibility issues with some memories). I think right now the best manufacturers of AMD-based motherboards are Asus, Abit, and DFI.

# posted by David 1:24 AM

I agree. After being confounded by the old Intel AGP cards (i740?) that wouldn't load the drivers UNTIL the BIOS had been upgraded AND the 4in1's were up to date I do it out of habit now and haven't had any of the problems Bill did. WinXP Pro makes it easier since it actually does have at least fair native driver support for onboard devices, and no one is still buying motherboards without onboard LAN are they?

# posted by WRM 7:54 AM

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