Careful with these critters.....
http://www.littlewhitedog.com/ "Problems with the new Detonator Drivers?
When the new 23.11 Detonator drivers were released yesterday, a whole bunch of people started to notice problems with an "infinite loop error" when running Windows XP - some games also "exit" whenever they feel like you're starting to get the upper hand. In a nutshell the new drivers allow your NVidia card access to a larger portion of memory than all previous drivers did - this is also why we've been seeing some promising speed increases from the 23.11's. However, because of this larger memory access improvement, a timing issue has evolved around the RX55 memory register (MWQ) in the BIOS when it is left in a opened state.
The MWQ timer is a timing device included in the memory host controller that prevents write data from being held in the memory queue too long. After the data has been in the queue too long it times out. This timed out data is then given a higher write request priority. Now that might sound nice – a bit of extra performance, BUT the procedure fails when overloaded because 3D games / Win XP put too much load on the memory queuing timer procedure.
There are several things you can do so solve the problem, such as loading optimized defaults in your BIOS and not modifying memory settings, set your memory settings in the BIOS less aggressively and test, make sure you have an adequate power supply, update your BIOS and test (some motherboard manufacturers have already released BIOS updates that have the register closed), and disable or enable AGP fast write and test. In some cases though, none of these solutions appear to fix the problem, and a patch must be applied that closes the RX55 memory register manually. Wanna get your hands on this patch?
Here's a link to it, but remember it's labeled as a BETA patch, and the word BETA is in all capital letters for a reason.
UPDATE: George Breese, the resident VIA Chipset guru at VIA Hardware has this to say about the patch: This patch detects the 0305, 3099, 3102, and 3112 (KT133x, KT266x, VT8662, and KLE133) *only*. On these chipsets, it will patch register 55 in the Northbridge, which will supposedly switch off a Memory Write Queue timer.
In the KT133A datasheet, register 55 is "reserved". But - yikes! - in the KT266, the documented MWQ register is register 95, not 55. Register 55 contains unrelated DDR timing adjustments and could actually be dangerous to program. For this reason, I do not recommend installing this driver on the KT266x chipsets until VIA examines this issue. For now, use WPCREDIT and set bits 5, 6, and 7 to zero in register 95 instead."
Thanks for the tip pb ...
[ 12-05-2001: Message edited by: Badger ]
