A7V600 and Radeon9200 - figure this if you can!?!

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gareth Jones
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Gareth Jones

Hi Folks,

Right, here we go:
I have a A7V600 with Athlon Xp2500 with Ti4200 and 512MB twinmos DDR3200

Fantastic combo - runs as XP3300 (2.3MHz 440FSB) rock solid, 24/7

So good in fact, A friend has bought an identical setup, with the
exception of him wanting a Radeon9200SE

This machine will not boot with the graphics card installed. Its silent
- not even a beep.
If I put a different Graphics card in, its fine.
If I put the offending Radeon in my machine, its fine.

Everything seems to work (with numerous cards) in any combination in any
machine EXCEPT HIS 9200 in HIS motherboard!?!

Both motherboards are the same V1.00
He had Bios 1005 (the latest). I had 1004. We even copied my bios and
flashed his to the earlier one and checked all the settings were
identical - nothing doing!?!

Obviously he can get a different card and it should work - but why the
hell is it doing what it is????
Any suggestions??

TIA

--
__________________________________________
<Gareth Jones> usenet@_ns_swansea.demon.co.uk

"Reality sucks - go watch a Star Trek"

To email, remove the '_ns_' from
usenet@_ns_swansea.demon.co.uk
__________________________________________
 
Gareth Jones said:
Hi Folks,

Right, here we go:
I have a A7V600 with Athlon Xp2500 with Ti4200 and 512MB twinmos DDR3200

Fantastic combo - runs as XP3300 (2.3MHz 440FSB) rock solid, 24/7

So good in fact, A friend has bought an identical setup, with the
exception of him wanting a Radeon9200SE

This machine will not boot with the graphics card installed. Its silent
- not even a beep.
If I put a different Graphics card in, its fine.
If I put the offending Radeon in my machine, its fine.

Everything seems to work (with numerous cards) in any combination in any
machine EXCEPT HIS 9200 in HIS motherboard!?!

Both motherboards are the same V1.00
He had Bios 1005 (the latest). I had 1004. We even copied my bios and
flashed his to the earlier one and checked all the settings were
identical - nothing doing!?!

Obviously he can get a different card and it should work - but why the
hell is it doing what it is????
Any suggestions??

TIA
Click to expand...

Next to the AGP slot, you will see a legend labelled "AGP_WARN".
Asus has stopped soldering the red LED and series current limiting
resistor onto the motherboard, but I suspect the rest of the
circuit is still there and protecting the mobo. If the circuit
thinks a 3.3V I/O video card has been placed in the AGP slot, it
will prevent PS_ON# from being asserted to the power supply. So,
the symptoms would be, the green power LED on the motherboard will
light up, but attempts to turn the power on will fail (the CPU
fan and the PS fan won't spin). Removing the video card should
allow the motherboard to attempt to POST without a video card -
you should get beeps telling you that no video card was found,
but the fans should be spinning etc.

As to why this is, I don't know what the circuit is sensing
(the TYPEDEF pin or an actual supply rail pin).

You may want to RMA the motherboard, to get an AGP_WARN circuit
that works properly.

HTH,
Paul
 
Paul said:
If the circuit
thinks a 3.3V I/O video card has been placed in the AGP slot, it
will prevent PS_ON# from being asserted to the power supply. So,
the symptoms would be, the green power LED on the motherboard will
light up, but attempts to turn the power on will fail (the CPU
fan and the PS fan won't spin)
Click to expand...

Hmmm... Its not on the desk now for me to check - but I think the fans
DO come on.
But why would one board do this and an identical one not ???

One thing that did just strike me half an hour ago though, I haven't
overclocked the suspect machine yet for obvious reasons, however while
the processor needs PC2700 RAM, its got PC3200 in it to push the FSB up
later. However, if the RAM timing is set to 'SPD', then isn't it going
to run the memory at 400MHZ while the processor is still at 333??
This is the one thing that is different with the 'working' board as that
has the RAM and FSB both at the same speed (albeit 440!!)
????

--
__________________________________________
<Gareth Jones> usenet@_ns_swansea.demon.co.uk

"Reality sucks - go watch a Star Trek"

To email, remove the '_ns_' from
usenet@_ns_swansea.demon.co.uk
__________________________________________
 
Gareth Jones said:
Hmmm... Its not on the desk now for me to check - but I think the fans
DO come on.
But why would one board do this and an identical one not ???

One thing that did just strike me half an hour ago though, I haven't
overclocked the suspect machine yet for obvious reasons, however while
the processor needs PC2700 RAM, its got PC3200 in it to push the FSB up
later. However, if the RAM timing is set to 'SPD', then isn't it going
to run the memory at 400MHZ while the processor is still at 333??
This is the one thing that is different with the 'working' board as that
has the RAM and FSB both at the same speed (albeit 440!!)
????
Click to expand...

If the fans come on, then it is a different problem. If the processor is
able to run, there should be beeping if it cannot access the video card.

By all means, put a different video card in there and set it up
for overclocking. You never know, it might decide to work. But your
RAM problem should also happen with a different video card, so that
is unlikely to be the source of the problem.

I did a quick search in Google and nothing jumped out at me...

Good luck,
Paul
 
Paul said:
But your
RAM problem should also happen with a different video card, so that
is unlikely to be the source of the problem.
Click to expand...

Unlikely..... But not impossible!


Well, for anyone else googling in the future who has a similar problem -
I've sorted it at last and here's what it was:

The original problem of the machine not booting when the Radeon9200 was
installed (but would boot with other graphics cards) was indeed a faulty
RAM module (go figure?!?). Fortunately, as I had an identical spec
machine, I swapped the DIMM and voila! The Radeon now booted as well.

However the machine was still playing up and each time you would reboot,
it would enter the BIOS, say there had been a CPU prob, and you'd have
to reset the parameters (even when nothing had gone wrong!!)

This turned out to be a combination of the Radeon9200 and BIOS
version1004. When I flashed it back to 1005 - everything worked fine!
(Although bizarrely - my machine runs 1004 fine!?!)

Now, my friends is running as stable as mine. The XP2500 is set at about
2.2GHz which equates to an XP3200 if I recall, and once again, this is
with stock heatsink and standard voltages all round.
6 hours straight of 2dmark2001 without a hitch - what a chip :-)

--
__________________________________________
<Gareth Jones> usenet@_ns_swansea.demon.co.uk

"Reality sucks - go watch a Star Trek"

To email, remove the '_ns_' from
usenet@_ns_swansea.demon.co.uk
__________________________________________
 
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