Weirdness with new video card - opinions

[bloom25]

The cards are rated below 48W *typical*, but peak is going to be higher...

I'll see if I can find some more info.

Regardless, I bought an XP 1900+, 2 x 256 MB PC2100 Corsair, and Asus A7N266-C board.  I'm going to see if the problem is still there.  I think it's likely my old Asus A7V (2 years old now) just wasn't designed with cards like this in mind.

[bloom25]

The problem isn't present on my new nForce board.  (Which I just got running about an hour ago.)  I've got a long way to go before I get everything installed, but all seems to be running great.

[FOGOLD]

Try another driver. My son gets that rainbow thing on his geforce2 often after waking up from power saving.

[Slash27]

Thanks gatt

[LePaul]

Same deal here, Gigabyte motherboard (which has a nice sticker that reads "FULLY COMPATIBLE with nVIDIA GEFORCE 4 MX4(NV17) SERIES"  (that cover the GeForce 4 4600?

Now, my bios is all a mess.  For some reason, my new dilemma is after about 1 minute of anything 3D...Aces High, 3DMark, etc, I lock up.

Ideas?  I'm about to tell Tom's Hardware what I think of their advice...

[bloom25]

I remember typing in some thread that perhaps that series of Gigabyte board had issues with GF 4 cards.  I've looked at a lot of different forums over the past few days, http://www.viaarena.com and anandtech to name a couple and this seems to be a common issue.

This isn't a VIA chipset issue, since lots of people have got the GF 4 cards to work, but rather it seems to be an issue with the MBs themselves.  I personally think the issue is related to power or possibly a flaw in the GF 4 design itself that keeps it from working on many boards.  

My advise would be to call Gigabyte and talk to them and if the problem can't be solved within a day or two, RMA the board.  It's not worth messing with it, trying powersupply after powersupply and flashing the bios over and over hoping to get it to work.

My problems all went away when I switched to this Asus A7N266-C board, which uses nVidia's nForce 415D chipset.  So far I haven't had a bit of trouble with it (though I haven't yet reinstalled everything I had on my old computer).  I have messed around with AH offline and everything works perfectly as far as I can tell.   This board doesn't have USB 2 or Raid, but I didn't need a Raid controller and I can always go out and buy a USB 2 controller if I need one.  

The only thing with the nForce boards is they are kind of picky on memory.  You can only use 2 double sided sticks of RAM in slots 1 and 2.  Slot 3 must be a single sided DIMM.  I just put in 2 x 256 MB Corsair PC 2100 sticks in slots one and two and all works great.  You can use 2 x 512 MB sticks if you want though.

[LePaul]

Hi Bloom, I just responded to you on the other thread as well.

Via Arena has been intriguing.  I read in there for almost 2 hours, pretty much shaking my head and groaning.  You may recall a few months ago I had similar woes with a Tyan dual cpu motherboard.  I just can't beleive the motherboard makers just cant get it right.  I mean, it was years ago when you just never had problems with motherboards...they worked, or didn't..that's it.  No frequenting websites for latest bios's etc.  Sigh.

It seems many of those in that forum have made the jump to the MSI board.  My local dealer does not have the Asus but does have the MSI brand.  He's willing to trade me even for the MSI board, and I'll remove the Giga-Crap from my case tonight.

For what its worth, the GEForce 4 card, running at that Quinc something 4x FSAA is stunning.  Its the only setting I can run without lockups and I'm seeing 76fps all over Aces High with it.  Don't know how high the FPS will go since I can't run on a lesser mode without the motherboard locking up