9800XT on PCI bus. Problems....

[meatflower]

I have a Biostar NF4UL-A9 with a Athlon 64 3600+. The motherboard has what they have dubbed an X G P (this is being censored for some reason if I don't put spaces in) slot, a basterdized AGP sloth operating through the PCI bus because Nforce4 does not support AGP. Certain cards are not compatible but according to several sources my card, the Radeon 9800XT works perfectly. This has not been my experience.


Playing 3D games (I test mainly with City of Heroes) they will freeze after about 1 minute, VPU recover will come on and then they will run for about 2 seconds, VPU Recover, and then it just locks up into a repeated VPU Recover. The card is not overheating, it will do this after a cold start. I have tried this on 2 installations of Windows XP, and now on Windows XP 64 bit edition. Every time I get the same results. I've used the Omega drivers, latest ATI driver, and ATI drivers for Windows XP x64. All the same results.

I am going to try to explain the crash so you all may better understand my hypothesis. The game usually crashes when I move the camera "too fast" or "too much". I remember yesterday a certain attack hit me that causes a large particle effect, the game stuttered on that particle effect and I almost thought it was going to freeze and do VPU recover. So it almost seems as if when too much happens on the screen the card locks up.

I had this card previously installed in another system and have been using it for the past 8 months with NO problems whatsoever. I am almost certain that the problems caused are because it is running the through the PCI bus and trying to do "too much" for the speeds of PCI. I have checked SmartGART, AGP is set to "Off", and Fast Reads and Writes are "Off". This would seem to eliminate my previous theory but I still think it has to do with it running on PCI bus.

I worked on this for about 10 hours yesterday, reinstalling OS's, drivers, and ending up with nothing but frustration. I write this email the next morning after trying just about everything in hopes that someone on here will have some idea. I thank you for your time.

 

[Obi_Kwiet]

Do you mean it's running through a PCI-E bus or a PCI bus?

 

[Flak Monkey]

It's running through the PCI (not PCI-E) bus.

 

[V99]

There is a 9800XT PCI Editon? Never knew that

 

[Flak Monkey]

No, there isnt, his board has a PCI-E and AGP port and the AGP port runs off the pci bus (makeing it slow and almost unuseable).

 

[dderidex]

No, there isnt, his board has a PCI-E and AGP port and the AGP port runs off the pci bus (makeing it slow and almost unuseable).

Ummmm.....LOL.

You DO know what AGP is, right?

AGP was nothing more than a hack workaround to the limitations of PCI. The "AGP Bus"...well, there isn't any such thing. It's merely a dedicated PCI bus to the video card, tuned such that it can send data to the card 8 times per clock (in the case of AGP 8x).

All the other PCI devices in your system, hard drives, etc sit on the OTHER PCI bus (and share it).

 

[pxc]

The "AGP Bus"...well, there isn't any such thing. It's merely a dedicated PCI bus to the video card, tuned such that it can send data to the card 8 times per clock (in the case of AGP 8x).

There definitely IS an AGP bus. It's clearly defined here: http://members.datafast.net.au/dft0802/specs/agp30.pdf , and in the previous versions. The major differences, besides speed (33/66MHz SDR for PCI vs 66MHz QDR/ODR for AGP 4x/8x)...

"The AGP specification adds 20 additional signals not included in the PCI bus."

USB+
USB-

ST[0-2]
PIPE#
RBF#

SB_STB
SBA[0-7]
AD STB[0-1]

SMB[0-1]

Running an AGP card in PCI-66 mode is defined in the spec, and is how motherboards like meatflower's runs AGP cards in a mangled PCI slot. None of the AGP bus features like SMB, SBA, pipelining (PIPE#, RBF#, ST[]) are available that way, of course.

 

[DanK]

A friend of mine has an Albatron P4 board with this feature. The slot is electrically compatible with AGP, but doesn't get any of the Acceleration that makes AGP different from PCI (so really, it's just a GP ). The main effect of this is that while performance in some games is almost as good, in games that depend on high fillrates (Far Cry) the performance will tank. As to why it's crashing, I couldn't say, but it might be an issue with the drivers. The easiest solution would probably be to replace it with a PCI-Express video card.