A7N8X-X and AGP problem - the answer

  • Thread starter Thread starter Hubert Hump
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Hubert Hump

I posted this question last month.

I have a new A9N8X-X that works fine with a PCI video card but won't
boot with the new video card I bought with the mobo, a Sapphire Radeon
9200SE 64M DDR TVO. I borrowed a friends machine to test the card, and
it works fine in his machine. I tried his video card (a Radeon 8500DV)
in the A7N8X-X and had the same problem. No POST. The cpu fan spins and
the LED is on, but nothing else happens. No beeps. It's dead.

The motherboard is working great with the PCI card. I installed XP with
no problem. I had to install the latest nForce drivers from nVidia's web
site to get it to shut down without a BSOD, but other than that, it's
been fine.

I'm using the setup defaults in the bios. The only setting I changed is
the cpu external frequency. I changed it from 100 to 166 for the Athlon
MP 2500+ I'm using.

The case has a 300 watt power supply. I'm using a single stick of PC3200
ram, 512MB. The only addon card in the machine right now is the video
card. No external hardware is connected. The only other hardware in the
case is a 20MB ide drive, a Plextor IDE CD burner and a floppy drive.

Should I be tweaking some of the AGP settings in the bios setup?

The answer:

Disable 8X AGP in the BIOS.
 
Hubert Hump said:
I posted this question last month.

I have a new A9N8X-X that works fine with a PCI video card but won't
boot with the new video card I bought with the mobo, a Sapphire Radeon
9200SE 64M DDR TVO. I borrowed a friends machine to test the card, and
it works fine in his machine. I tried his video card (a Radeon 8500DV)
in the A7N8X-X and had the same problem. No POST. The cpu fan spins and
the LED is on, but nothing else happens. No beeps. It's dead.

The motherboard is working great with the PCI card. I installed XP with
no problem. I had to install the latest nForce drivers from nVidia's web
site to get it to shut down without a BSOD, but other than that, it's
been fine.

I'm using the setup defaults in the bios. The only setting I changed is
the cpu external frequency. I changed it from 100 to 166 for the Athlon
MP 2500+ I'm using.

The case has a 300 watt power supply. I'm using a single stick of PC3200
ram, 512MB. The only addon card in the machine right now is the video
card. No external hardware is connected. The only other hardware in the
case is a 20MB ide drive, a Plextor IDE CD burner and a floppy drive.

Should I be tweaking some of the AGP settings in the bios setup?

The answer:

Disable 8X AGP in the BIOS.
Click to expand...

Something else you can experiment with, is change "AGP frequency"
from "Auto" to "66MHz". Then try AGP 8X again. There are reports
that Auto doesn't always do the right thing, depending on your
choice of FSB. Some of the newer video cards are not nearly
as tolerant of overclock, and 75MHz for some of them is the
upper limit.

Another thing, the 8500DV would be a 4X max card, and you said it
didn't run. The motherboard wouldn't try to run it at 8x, so
something else must be up with that. If you have a spare power supply,
you might also try swapping that in. To prove whether the effort
is necessary or not, take a look at the Power Monitor in the BIOS,
or use a utility like MBM5 from http://mbm.livewiredev.com/ .
The tolerance on your power supply is printed on the label,
and will be a number like 5% or so. To check the voltages while
gaming, MBM5 can be configured to log the voltage readings
every 10 seconds, to a text file, so you don't have to be able to
see the "dashboard" of the tool to use it. On the surface of
it, there isn't enough hardware in your computer to overload
the power supply, but weak supplies are a common occurrence
in this group. (And, it is funny how some of the people suffering
from weak supplies, are able to run their systems with a much
older 250W supply.)

HTH,
Paul
 
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