IWill KK266+ w/ ATI Rage Fury....?

[RedVR6]

Hi all...Curious if anyone has any thoughts on this issue I am having with my video card. Last week I replaced my MB (an ASUS A7V (died)) with a new IWill KK266 plus and the MB does not seem to like my ATI Rage Fury VCard very much. First off, here are my specs:

Duron 800
192MB RAM PC100
ATI Rage Fury vcard
Sound Blaster Live! Value card
3COM NIC
Adaptec SCSI card
6.4G C:\
2G D:\
40x CD ROM
250W P/S
Win98SE
....

Upon first booting the machine I was receiving BIOS error beeps on for the vcard...I soon found that fiddling with the reset button fixes that issue when having to power the machine on...this is still an issue...but the machine rarely gets turned off, so I am not too concerned with it right now.

Once Windows is fully loaded I seem to be having a display issue. (Note: I did download the most recent drivers for this card and the most recent VIA 4 in 1 drivers too....DX8 as well). As soon as a program, say IE, is loaded...the screen goes blank, the monitor to standby....and the machine continues to run. Obviously, I have to crash the system and reboot.

While this was happening....my display properties at set as the following: 32bit @ 1024x768 at a refresh rate of 85Mhz. (This is what I had running with the ASUS with no issues)....First off I changed the colors to 16Bit...rebooted and got the same results...a blank screen once something is started. So, I tried changing the refresh rates from Optimal to 85Mhz on both 16bit and 32 bit colors...still the screen would continue to blank out. My last attempt on this before having an anurism... I went to the 'performace' tab under 'advanced settings' and reduced the hardware acceleration setting down one notch...rebooted. The screen did not blank out...but I was getting slight distortion on screen and the mouse would disappear once in a while when passing over icons or toolbars....so I reduced the acceleration down again one more notch and that seems to have solved my display issues.

So....I was wondering if IWIll MB's conflict a little with the ATI Rage Fury card? I did some research on the IWILLUSA.com site and found a few things there...but nothing pertaining specifically to my situation. Perhaps I have a slight BIOS issue here...Kind of at a loss and would appreciate any comments/suggestions.

BTW....I went to rageunderground.com and downloaded their Tweak utility there...but have not played with it yet hoping for another solution first.

TIA!

[RedVR6]

Just wanted to add another note here....If I am not mistaken the ATI RF card is an AGP 2x card...and the BIOS has AGP 4x enabled...I would assume disabling it would help with this issue?

[Xayd]

Yes, disable 4x and see if that fixes the problem, chances are it will.

[RedVR6]

I hope so....I will give it a run tonight when I get home from work and see what happens. Thanks!

[RedVR6]

Well...changing from 4x to 2x solved the boot up issue...still having problems with the card when the performance setting is changed on it...So, other than my BIOS change...I am back to where I was in my original post. Any thoughts? I am thinking the MB is not liking this card much or the card is crapping out on me.

[mike breck]

Hi RedVR6,

Try doing a clean install of the Rage drivers. For the procedure see here

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...threadid=18832

Obviously, this is for a geoforce, so you will have substitute the Rage drivers when you conduct your search and destroy mission in the registry and Windows System folder. Just take a note of all the existing Rage drivers listed in DX and Display properties, then go find them.

Then reinstall the new drivers and DX.

There does seem to be issues between the Rage Fury and a few mobos. In fact, IWill's advice on one occasion was to "buy a Radeon". Not very helpful I'm afraid.

If you didn't do so when you installed the mobo, it may be an idea to re partition and format your Hard Drive and reinstall Windows. I know it isn't the usual preferred method on these forums for when installing a new mobo, but sometimes it can solve a lot of problems. A clean install of Windows will also run much faster.

Let us know how you got on.

[RedVR6]

Mike,

Thanks for responding. I did not install a clean version of Win98 (I deleted the Enum key from the registry and went from there)...I was trying ot cut a few corners ( )and hoping I would get lucky with the MB installation like I have in the past on other machines. I am considering blowing the machine away and starting fresh though. I will give your suggestion a try first...(removing all instances of ATI drivers/files/folders and ATI registry keys and work it from there.

Another thing i noticed last night, that I forgot to mention from the BIOS was the AGP Apreature size...it is set at the default of 64...What is this?? The manual was very brief on this one.

Thanks!!

DK

[mike breck]

The AGP bus can address your system memory (i.e. your ram) directly. This enables the AGP card to store textures in system memory. As these textures are stored, performance is increased as the card doesn't have to start from scratch each time the textures are needed. The AGP Aperture therefore controls the amount of textures that is stored in system memory.

The default is usually 64Mb. However, if you have enough Ram, it will do no harm to experiment with 128Mb or 256Mb. In fact, increasing the Aperture size has been recommended as a fix for some games.

I have mine at 128Mb at the moment.

HTH

[RedVR6]

Well Mike,

I tried to do what you suggested and that did not work out. So I ended up blowing the machine away and starting with a fresh install of Win98. Machine is working like it did when I set it up way back when. Much happier now! Thanks to all who helped!

Doug