From: Charles Barnard: Subject: [PCBUILD] TNT2 system freezing often


> Hi
>
> I would be very glad if you could give me advice.
>
> My system looks as follows :
>  - Windows 98
>  - Sniper 2 (TNT2) manufactured by Powercolor
>  - Gigabyte 440LX motherboard (66MHz FSB) with 128MB of RAM
>  - Intel Celeron 466MHz
>  - DirectX7a
>  - latest Powercolor drivers (although I have tried all nvidia/detonator
> drivers)
>
>  When I play the Quake3 demo (OpenGL) the computer freezes after about
>  5 minutes. Sometimes the graphics changes into vertical lines before
>  the computer freezes.
>
>  With certain directX games, where there are lots of 3D effects, the
>  computer also freezes after about 5 minutes.
>
>  I am currently in communication with the manufacturer of the video card,
> but no solution has been suggested.
>
>  Thank you for your time. Any advice would be appreciated.
>
>  Charles Barnard
> Cape Town, South Africa
>

Charles,

Heat can cause the problems you are talking about.  There are some good fans
that can be added to the heat sink, try this site: http://www.3dfxcool.com/
and follow the links to the Video card coolers or this site:
http://2cooltek.safeshopper.com/4/20.htm?618.

Some other things you might check are your BIOS settings:

Assign IRQ to VGA (or video) - Find this somewhere in your BIOS set it ON or
AUTO.
Video BIOS cacheable - disabled.
Video BIOS shadow - disabled.
VGA Palette Snoop- disabled.
PCI Palette Snoop- disabled.
C8xxxx-CBxxxx Shadow- disabled

Also check your AGP aperture setting
In general, for AGP cards, setting the AGP aperture to half your RAM is a
good idea. In some problematic cases, setting it to 64 or 256 Megs might
prevent weird lockups.  Some owners may also require that it be set to 4 or
8 Megs to force the TNT to use it's own RAM instead of system RAM.

You can also try one of these:

1) Change the RAM into another RAM slot (usually the slots furthest from the
CPU).
(2) Change the ram settings to CAS3 from CAS 2.
(3) Disable ACPI in Windows 98/95.

Also check for an antivirus program running in the background, which can
cause slow downs and lock ups in 3D games.

Hope this helps,

Mary Wolden

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