From: Bill Nussbaumer :Subject: [PCBUILD] GeForce2 / AGP4X / and Abit BH6


> A friend of mine just bought a Geforce2 card and has been having some
> problems.  After a few minutes of playing any game his monitor will shut
> off but sound continues.  The monitor doesn't completely shut down but
> loses signal and goes into standby mode.  Only a reboot will bring it
> back.  His first card was the Creative brand and he exchanged it for the
> Guillemont.  Same problem with both.  Others on the newsgroups have
> reported seeing the same problem regardless of the brand of card
(creative,
> hercules, elsa, guillimont, it didn't seem to matter) but it seemed like
> the common denominator was the fact that they were all running the Abit
BH6
> motherboard.  My friend has the Abit BH6 (and I do too so I'm very
> interested in this for when I buy a GeForce2).
>
> My questions are:
>
> Will the Geforce2 (an AGP 4X card) work reliably in the AGP 1X Abit BH6
> main board?
>
> Would running this board require power requirements not handled by the
Abit
> BH6? (Kind of the same question)
>
> One respondent on the newsgroups claimed to solve his problem by setting
> his AGP aperture size to 16 (down from the default 64).  When my friend
> attempted this the could no longer run games in 16 bit color.  Could
> someone shed some light on this?  What exactly does the aperture size do?
> Why would it make the card more stable and why would it disallow games
> running at 32 bit color.
>
>
> Thanks for any help you can provide,
>
> - Bill Nussbaumer
>

Bill,

Guillemot has a compatibility document on their website

http://www.guillemot.com/northamerica/main/products/3d_prophet/comp3dx32_021
600.doc )covering motherboards that they have tested with the 3D Prophet
card and the BH6 was listed as a good motherboard.  I have a Creative
Annihilator Pro which is installed on a Abit BE6 which I moved to a BH6 to
see if it would work.  Creative's Fastrax driver allowed me to select AGP 1x
for the card, proper BIOS settings and a separate IRQ for the GeForce and I
had no problem.  The GeForce2 is less power hungry then its predecessors but
it should work also.  I don't know which revision of the BH6 you have but I
have revision 1.1.  You also do not mention whether the CPU is overclocked
or not.  There also has been some mention that the GeForce cards will not
work with some monitors but I do not know which monitors they are.

The GeForce cards do not like to share an IRQ so you might have to go into
the BIOS and manually select IRQ's for all of the PCI cards.  PCI slot 1
can't be populated as it shares an IRQ with the AGP slot.

Some items to check when setting up the GeForce cards 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 the following:

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.
(4) Disable any virus checking programs running in the background

Power can be another problem depending on how many slots are populated and
fans connected to the motherboard.  I had to upgrade my power supply on the
BE6 from a 250w to a 300w power supply to stabilize the system.  I also
connected the fan on the card to the power supply instead of the video card.

The AGP ports enables video cards to use texture maps directly from system
memory instead of just caching then in local memory.  The graphics
controller and CPU use a single aperture of several megabytes to access the
AGP memory.  The chipset translates memory addresses so the graphics
controller and its software can see it as a single chunk in main memory
allowing the graphics controller to access large textures as single objects.
If the AGP aperture is less then 64 MB in some systems you disable AGP
completely, other systems disable AGP at 16 MB or below.

Hope this helps,

Mary Wolden

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