MSI 648 Max and ATI 9700 problems - how to fix?

[TODave]

Having nothing but problems since I put a Sapphire 9700 (not Pro) board in my MSI 648 Max m/b.

I keep reading that there are 'known problems' with the 648 chipset (or is it just the MSI 648 Max m/b???) and the 9700 but frustratingly no one seems to mention what the cure is!

What am I meant to be doing? XP keeps locking up and upon reboot says something like 'There was a problem with the driver for 9700'. I've tried 3 different sets of drivers without success. The only way I can get the system stable is to turn off hardward acceleration.

Any help please folks? Many thanks!

(my first post for about 6 months!)<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by TODave on 08/28/03 04:48 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[ufo_warviper]

First of all how many Watts is your power supply? If your video card is too beefy, than it is likely to not work stabily if your Powersupply can't supply the card with enough power.

My OS features preemptive multitasking, a fully interactive command line, & support for 640K of RAM!

 

[Crashman]

Usually problems like that are caused by low power to the video card, where it can't operate certain functions. But yes, there were problems with most 648 chipset boards. And as far as I know, they weren't caused by the 648 chipset directly.

I saw a firsthand example of how Asus tried to make the P4S533 into the P4S8X by following the guidelines toward making the memory traces equal length. They took the shortest paths and made them longer by zig zagging them. This of course caused memory problems, each corner of the trace adds capacitance, and memory operates off capacitance!

So the problem was usually poorly designed boards based on earlier 645 chipset boards, improperly modified for the 648. I've seen various ways to stabilize them, such as turning off AGP8x, setting BIOS to a different AGP access mode (was it ICWS?), turning off fast writes, limitting the RAM frequency, increasing vRAM, etc. You can try any or all of these if you like.

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