FX5200DT Drivers problem (nVidia/Abit)

[mikeymike]

Sanity check your BIOS settings.  Run them by me here if need be.

[mikeymike]

Which settings in the bios?

Tell me what pages/sections you've got in your BIOS, and I'll tell you which of those you need to reel off the current settings for.

The problem is, different companies name stuff differently, so it's hard to say just straight off.

[mikeymike]

There are a lot more options in most BIOS's that affect PnP, AGP etc than that, sadly.

The FX5200 should be AGP4x so those settings look ok.  The 'version' is going to be the ABit BIOS version, check on the ABit site to make sure it's the latest version (if they provide any BIOS updates at all).

I think the FX5200 is newer than XP, so I wouldn't expect XP to detect anything useful about it ("PCI compatible VGA adapter" is all I'd expect).  XP only detects devices it has a driver for, and/or has been fed an INF file for at some point.

I'm very much inclined to think this problem is lower-level than the OS.  BIOS, motherboard I'm thinking.

That is, if you've removed all possible obstacles (AV is a bit of a thin one, but worthwhile as a desperate measure, anything like multiple desktop manager type stuff, upgrade DX to the latest version, what motherboard drivers have you got installed, etc).

[mikeymike]

NVidia's graphics driver uninstaller has worked for me ok, I've changed driver versions back and forward with or without the uninstaller without issues.

I'm using 56.64 with my Ti4200 without problems, and on an ABit GF2MX.

[mikeymike]

Cheers anyways Guess this means I don't have to write down the menu system for my bios now

You might want to anyway - there was an insanely obscure option which doubled OpenGL performance on my machine (though it is a quirk of my model motherboard I think).  I've a fair amount of experience in messing with BIOS options to improve performance, but up to you :-)

I haven't had the generic AGP drivers give me problems before, usually it is crap 3rd party AGP drivers that I've seen problems with, but I still usually try them out.

[mikeymike]

My Ti4200 is managing:

core: 300MHz
mem: 563MHz

Which is about a Ti4600 isn't it?  Jedi Academy seems a bit smoother when it gets to a busy moment.

I'll probably push the overclock further yet.