Hello all...

My first post here...I'm also one of unlucky users who bought P4G8X and R9500 (got my card modded to be 9700). It worked perfectly without a crash or any errors on the P4B and since I got the new mobo, crash after crash...FSim usually didn't hold on longer than 10min.
Running AGP Voltage at 1.7 and FastWrites OFF. 8x agp and uswc setting.
I will do some more testing to see if it's really stable.
Kosta

Tyler, glad to see you got your system stable after fighting with it. Many of your earlier posts were what I was looking at when I was fighting with my system, but I never got my system to the point that I could even run 3dmark. I updated everything possible with the latest versions and nothing. Including bios, accelerator, inf thing, catalyst drivers, bios settings, etc... nothing worked for me.

The only factor that was not quite right was the version of xp i was using was not yet "activated" I had installed it, and but it still wanted an activation serial after I got it up and running. I had basically a 30 day trial till it expired. But I can't see how that could have possibly been a problem. I was still able to apply service packs, and updates...

Also I retract a bit from my last post. Some games are still seeing random crashes on my Win2K system (but at least the system is stable enough to play them at all) Dungeon Siege hasn't been able to play yet for more than a few minutes, and Battlefield 1942 crashed once on me. Argh. For the $1100+ I just spent on this system I was hoping to finally have a good STABLE system, but I guess that's just a pipedream. Is there such a thing as a stable system? I think I'll ghost what I have right now, then try a diff version of XP I have that doesn't need the activation.

Also I have a question for tweakers out there. Just wondering what are some good tweaks to get a system to perform well but not to stress it out or cause it to be less stable. Running my system with vanilla settings across the board (not really tweaking anything) 3dmark2001 was giving me scores in the 12,000's Every test I see online with the same system I have shows scores well over 15000. Am I going to have to overclock things to get these kinds of scores?

P4 3.06
Asus P4G8x
1 gig DDR266 2100 "fast" ram
Western Dig 80 gig w/8meg buffer
SBLive soundcard

Thanks much,
Russ Prince

OK....that's it! After the 2,342nd crash...I've had enough. I cant take any more of this. I am not a rich man, nor do I have money shooting out of my ass. But...what I do have is common sense. I am sending my card back to ATI and getting the new 9800pro.
Here is what I did:

p4g8x and 9500 pro card.....nothing but problems on all bios/display settings.

p4g8x went back for a p4c800. Reformatted and re installed everything. crashes diminished...but still exist. All drivers updated, bios included. Memory tested in DOS for 24 straight hours withput a single error. Radeon is still causing sporadic crashes.

I am RMA'ing this video card for a 9800pro and we will see what happens. I will keep you all posted. (probably Friday, this week)

If it crashes like it does now, ATI can kiss my ass. NVidia will get my cash from that day forward.

Peace

Someone please tell me whether all these problems still exist with the P4C800 and a Rev 30 or higher Radeon 9700 Pro. That is what I have ordered and I am hoping that will work. Please god let it work since this will be the first computer I have ever built.

OK, I'm just your average computer hardware junky, but I know crap when I see it and the 9700 pro card I purcahsed last week is nothing but crap!

Quick breakdown of my system components:

Asus P4C800 (bios 1003), oem $266 Radeon 9700 pro (3.2 drivers), 2GB pc3200 DDR, 350W PSU, card revision xxxxx-00, WinXP pro.

Initially I was locking up a few times here and there and I suspected that I may have a bad memory module. I picked up a DOS level memory checking utility at microsoft.com and let it run for over an hour without issue. Once I returned back to Windows, the system began locking up and rebooting frequently, especially during large data transfers and during Screensaver/Standby mode. Two things really stuck out, the card revision and the power supply since my card was xxxxx-00 and my power supply is only 350W, I couldn't be any worse off. *grin*

The frustration wassetting in and after reading all of the related posts in this discussion forum, I decided to RMA the card and start again from scratch. Fortunately, I had only just purchased the card last week and I am still covered under the initial 14 day warranty. (Knock on wood) I have everything packaged and ready to mail first thing tomorrow.

First, I looked into getting a new power supply but unfortunately my local hardware supplier was all out of 400W+ PSU's. So I decided to pick up a new card at a local retailer figuring that although I would pay more, ($299) to be exact, I could expect to receive the latest card revision along with assurances that if this card failed as well, there would be no issues with getting my money back.

Now the good news. I've been running solid for 3+ hours this evening and not a single lockup or reboot. In fact, I've even pulled across many gigs of data intent on moving my old Windows desktop over to my new system.

No 3D benchmarks yet, as I am just getting situated and enjoying the current situation without crazy hangs and reboots.

Summary:

- My new card is a revision xxxxx-30 and runing like a champ.
- The old card was a xxxxx-00 and it was bad to the core.
- Second observation, the power connectors between the two card version are in different locations. (nothing major, just an observation)

I will post again in a day or two after more run-time.

Regards,
Chris

Hi,

I’m an unlucky person that has the Asus P4G8X Deluxe MB and an ATI Radeon 9700PRO card. I’ve been getting the same problems as you guy are getting here. What’s more annoying is I only upgraded to the Radeon from a GeForce TI4800 card about a week ago. I got the offer to get a Radeon, which I’ve read is a slightly better card than the GeForce for nothing. Well since upgrading I’ve been having constant system crashes, I’m thinking of going back to the GeForce card after I try the solution you lot have suggested. My system never crashed with the GeForce card, even thou it’s an AGP8x card like the Radeon.

My question is if the E7205 chipset is buggy with AGP8x why was I not getting any problems with the GeForce running in AGP8x?

The only difference I can tell at the moment is in 3Dmark03 score,

GeForce TI4800 = 1976
Radeon 9700PRO = 4456

What is the best solution that you guys have come up with? I’ve read the thread and there is a lot. Is it update the BIOS and all the drivers, then change the voltage in the BIOS and turn of FastWrite and lower the AGP setting. If so what happens when DOOM 3 arrives? We just have to live with the slower performance of AGP4x?

To Barry:

Did you check the serial number of your radeon card? It seems that people who are having xxxxx-30 cards have no or less problems with the P4G8X mobo.

I believe it is still too early to tell if radeon 9800 has the same problems. And on the other hand, people who do not have problems with their radeon and P4G8X are less likely to look for forums like these...

I'll have a look when I get home from work today. The card is only 1weeks old, by that I got it from the supplier 1 week ago but I'll look anyways.

Take it the number is easy to find?

Barry,
I dont know why people are saying that there is a problem with the e7205 chipset. My hunch is that is a rumor. I base this on 2 things. First, is what you just said. You have had NO problems with a NVidia card and 8x with the p4g8x a.k.a. "Granite Bay" chipset. Second, I had that mobo with the radeon and experienced problem after problem...swapped it out for the newer mobo...the p4c800 a.k.a. "Canterwood" chipsete and I am still having the same problem.
I am sending the ATI back for the newer 9800pro and will keep you all posted. It is a *GASP* 400.00 card...and in my opinion...expensive.
But, as the old saying goes..."time is money" and all the reformatting and dinking around I have done, I could have easily earned the extra 100.00 to offset the cost if I wasnt spending all my time trying to "fix" my new computer.

It's been a while since i've posted, to recap i've got a:
Built by Radeon 9500 PRo, card revision does not apply to 9500 PRO
P4C800 deluxe, 1003 bios
settings:
agp voltage 1.8V
apeture 128 MB
AGP 8X
Fast Writes on
Quality Open GL and Direct3D settings
Heavy game playing: Unreal, Battlefield, Splinter Cell, RTCW...
Alot of DVD burning. Been using it like it should have been used from the start.
Haven't crashed since i applied these settings and that was more than a week ago, i think almost 2 now. It's been a long time. Can anyone else post their settings? I've had zero problems since i went to these settings.

Mike,

If you follow this thread, someone posted an errata sheet for the 7205 chipset that contained 2 known issues. One basically said that the chipset violates AGP 3.0 (8x) timing, and the motherboard manufacturers had to work around it by increasing some trace lengths on AGP signal lines on the motherboard. If you look at the date on the erratum, it is dated after the release date of the P4G8X, so chances are ASUS didn't have the relevant data to incorporate the workaround on the P4G8X. So there's definitely a bug. The nvidia boards may be designed with better AGP signal tolerance, which may explain why they still work fine with the 7205 chipset.

I have an older than rev 30 (it's a rev 11) 9700 Pro, and I was having the same issues with my P4G8X. I had to run in 4x to get it working perfectly, but I finally swapped for a P4C800, and so far after about 5 days I've still had no problems, and that's with 8x and fast writes enabled, and with AGP voltage at 1.5.

I haven't tried it, but my guess is that the 9800 Pro will not have the same problems, at least if ATI has paid any attention to this issue at all. Especially considering the 9700 was ATIs first 8x part, I would expect them to improve with the 9800.

Hello all again...
I got P4G8X and 9500 modded to be 9700 and a bit overclocked.
But apparently that's not a problem - because I tested it with both 3dmark 2001 and 2003, ran the whole night through looping the tests - all went through nicely without any error. I don't even have crashes to 640-480 any more, since I bought new PSU.
What my problem is: after some time playing the Flight Sim 2002, the game crashes with the message if I want to send a report or not, with Event Manager entry blah blah cannot find source, acgenral.dll or ntdll.dll (different files often). That never happened before on old P4B and GF2MX400 system.
Does anyone have any idea???

Kosta

Mr Songy,
Thank you for the explanation. So then, if Intel knew there was a problem with it's chipset timings at 8x, and ATI didnt get the message until AFTER the first or even second revision of its 9700 pro, that would explain why it crashes on the e7205 chipset. But....it DOES NOT explain why it crashes on my Canterwood based mobo, which, as I'm sure you realize, was relased well after the 9700/9500 was available.
Can you offer an explanation for that?
Thank you

Mmm, good point. My feeling is that E7205 is not at fault, but the R9xxx...

That's good deductive reasoning, but that doesn't explain why I have a P4G8X Deluxe mobo and a Radeon AIW 9700Pro that run together with no problems at all.

480W PS
AGP 8x
fastwrites off
AGP voltage 1.6v

badkitty109

turn the fastwrite on badkitty, u may see the crash more often ....

Thats the answer i received from sapphiretech about the p4g8x and the radeon9700... there wont be a chance to get these things working together.

"The card and motherboard combination is incompatible. This chipset irrespective of manufacturer will not run.

Ray"

As stated in my earlier post, I am here to report back my status after installing a brand new 9700 pro. I did receive (1) lockup after extended usage. However, there were no auto-reboots to report. I will continue to monitor the situation and plan to drop in a 480W PSU on Thursday, as well as re-install the WinXP OS just to be certain that I am not seeing OS corruption casued by all the prior and sudden reboots.

I also dropped ATI a line at their customer feedback page: http://mirror.ati.com/support/index.html

Not sure that it will make a difference, but I figured it was better than complaining to a non-ATI affiliated forum.

Regards,
Chris

Hello people...

I had the lockups problems with my p4g8x deluxe board and ati... So for me I just turn off the Fast Write off and system now very stable.There is no perfomance up with FW so I don't want to upgrade to another chipset I don't care about this s**tty FW hehe...

My PC is:

Aopen 300W Case
Ati Radeon Connect 3D 9500 PRO
ASUS P4G8X Deluxe
4x256(2100) ddr in dual mode
Intel Pentium 4-2666mhz
120gb WD 7200

All working fine with FW off thanks to this forum

just thought i'd add..........

my geforce 3 crashed to desktop all the time when i had fastwrites on and agp4x... turned fastwrites off and set to agp 1/2x and it worked fine.