Geforce trouble

[sponge]

The beta drivers usually aren't prone to problems, despite their name. But they usually don't encompass some huge speed increase, so it's all a matter of preference.

[R0B]

[MZGuy]

[refractor]

Check the BIOS to make sure its assigning an IRQ to VGA.

make sure the AGP aperture is at least 2x the amount of memory on your card.

(And if it's a Soundblaster Vibra 128, don't bother installing the piece of shit 'cos none of the drivers I tried have /ever/ work correctly .. except under Linux).

[James S]

Well, in all actuality you rarely need a bigger powersupply. If you've got a 250W powersupply that you know was built quality and the voltages never spike then it's more than enough. All you have to watch out for is voltage spikes because that will damage your CPU, your memory, and your graphics card. The wattage isn't as all important as a steady voltage.

[refractor]

The thing is that if a PSU is overloaded, it can *really* kill things. A friend's PSU overloaded and died, taking all three hard drives down with it (they don't like being power-starved while writing, it seems).

Also, in my experience, it's the voltage regulators on the motherboard which steady the voltage supply, rather than expecting the supply from the PSU to be rock-steady (my KT7a has a rock-stable voltage, whereas my BP6's voltages are a bit wiggy ... with the same supply).

250 is asking for trouble with PCs these days, 300 is still "iffy", IMHO, and 400 is definitely safe. I think it's worth getting a powerful PSU just for peace of mind...

Cheers,

Ref.

[MZGuy]

They only seemed to have the 300W PSU where I got it, so I went for it. And I guess they build their comps with that PSU too, so I guess it's nice.

I tried the AGP aperture size too, and that didn't help. Assign IRQ to VGA is turned on.

Anyway, I installed the SB AudioPCI 128 and everything seems to be fine. Guess I'll have to say bye to my Aureal card

Weird problem this, how the Aureal could start fighting just because of a change of GFX cards. And why everything was fine with AGP2X turned off.
Now with the SB I have 2X on and everything's fine. I hope it's not because the Aureal was too power hungry...

[James S]

Did you overclock your front side bus?

[(TSC)Bender]

If he did, he might have still had the same problem.
Also, if you can, turn AGP on to 4x

[James S]

That's what I'm saying. An overclocked FSB would have sped up the PCI adaptor and caused instability in the card. I'm thinking maybe with the faster more powerful graphics card the fluctuation could have been too much coupled with a sound card that might have been data/cpu intensive.

[MZGuy]

Well, at least I haven't overclocked anything by purpose I'll maybe check sometime though.

And, no, my MoBo doesn't seem to support AGP4X, only 2X

[James S]

Well I found out why MY computer was acting flooky all the time. I hadn't looked inside of it in a LONG time, atleast 6 months. So I decide to take a look, tinker around again, etc... Well I tip my computer over and about 3 spiders scurry away. oh-kay... . I continue to turn it over, I find that the entire bottom of my case was covered in spiderwebs, and the thick kind. With about 5 dead spiders inside the webs. I squish one of them that's still in there before he runs under my motherboard, then I clean out all the spider webs. After that I take a look at my fans and heatsinks to find them covered in dust. My computer's CPU was above 65*C because of all that dust (AMD 1.3GHz) and my Geforce3 must have been going over 80 because it has a thin heatsink and it was just all dust. So I remove ALL of the heatsinks, clean them all off, reapply ArcticSilverII to them and put them back on.

My computer works perfectly now, hasn't crashed once since I did that. Those spiders must have been running around on the PCB's shorting out components causing my computer to restart. I know that that's possible because I dropped a wrench on my computer when it was on and it hit a contact and completely turn off my computer until I removed it.

But I'm happy now. Make sure to check for "bugs" in the machine.

[Mike Bannick]

[Village_Ideot]

[MZGuy]