Major problems with Gigabyte 133A and G400

[Livius]

Hi!
I thought I should jump the Apollo 133A wagon so I went for the Gigabyte 6VX7-4X reviewed on Anandtech. Surprise, surprise: the G400 does not work (no textures), and I cannot enable DMA on my WD Expert without getting major Windows registry errors. Any suggestions?

My system:
Gigabyte 6VX7-4X
Coppermine 500MHz
128MB SDRAM
G400 16MB SH
WD Expert 20GB 7200rpm
(the Live! is as yet uninstalled)

The G400 runs 3D apps but misses all textures (BTW, the Matrox drivers recognize it as GA-G400). I run at AGP 1x with 5.50b. I would also appreciate suggestions on the DMA problem. No IRQs are shared in the system so far.

Thanks.

[paulcs]

I'd bet the farm that this is a VIA driver issue. What drivers are you using?

Paul
paulcs@flashcom.net

[Thundrchez]

Yikes, it recognizes it as a GA-G400? I would bet that is the root of the problems. I would definitely try to make sure that it properly recognizes it as a Matrox G400, not a GA-G400. You may want to try 5.52 drivers or maybe even 5.41 drivers.

[Livius]

Video problem solved when changing GA-G400 to Matrox Mill G400. There's just the damn DMA issue now. A bios upgrade made it possible to enable DMA but I get a lot of disk errors (FAT errors and lost chains) with DMA enabled, but not with DMA disabled.
Anyone know about this?

[EchoWars]

Isn't the 20 gig WD the one that was recalled?

[Ron]

See this link for the list of WD recalls: http://www.westerndigital.com/fitness/drive-alert.html
I haven't been impressed by their QA lately.
Ron


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BX6r2, 128MB PC100, C366A@567, Pan DVDwHollywood+,Pan 4X SCSI II CDR, WangDAT, Maxtor DiamondMax Plus HD, Seagate Hawk LP2, Fireport 40 UW, SBLive!Value (attached to bi-amped TEAC/Hitachi multimedia system), SMC Intel 21041 NIC, etc. G200 Mystique as well.

[Livius]

No! The 5400rpm Cavuars were recalled. The 7200rpm Experts are fine. I checked that before I bought it.
Anyway, I found the culprit. It's the Live!. As long as it's stuck in the motherboard, even IF UNINSTALLED in Win98, the DMA fails to work. As soon as I removed it, everything's fine. I am not sure yet, but the G400 may play a part here as well.

[Lorenzo Rizzi]

I am experiencing the same problems with a 6VX-4X Gigabyte motherboard and a 9GB SCSI WD hard disk driven by an Adaptec 2940U2W PCI.
I get VERY unreliable disk usage with file corruption, lost chains etc.
This only happens in Windows 98SE with both 4.17 and 4.20 4in1 VIA drivers.
Windows 2000 (with no extra drivers) works perfectly and very reliably.

A few more points:
I get the same when it comes to recognising my G400 Max dh. The system sees it as a GA-G400. Forcing the installation of the 5.41 drivers works fine including Q3. While installing version 5.52 breaks Quake3...

Another thing is since I updated the BIOS to the latest version (F4). Both W2K and Win98se refuse to install with the ACPI HAL. Again this was fine with the original BIOS version F1. Anybody know what the story is?

Last but not least, I get hangs in windows98se every now and then with the system stopping for a few seconds and then recovering by itself (reminds me of some TCP-IP pauses I got months ago). I have a SBLive Value and I'll try removing it as suggested, I hope that'll fix it even though I don't want to do without my sound card!

Overall, I'm getting a pretty bad experience with this motherboard even though I'm convinced almost all problems are driver based since Windows 2000 works so well (yes, including Q3).

Anybody managed to work around these problems without giving up the SBLive? Any more experiences to share?

Thanks,

Lorenzo

[Compton]

I never use the 4in1 drivers on my 133 anymore. It seemed like they were doing more harm than good on Win98SE. So I clean installed and I now use the MS provided drivers. I do however use the latest Via AGP patch as it gives me an additional 25fps.

[Lorenzo Rizzi]

When you say: "MS provided drivers", do you mean the ones included in the OS or is there some more drivers MS provides?
Thanks,

Lorenzo

[Compton]

sorry, i wasnt very clear on that. i meant the ones that come with win98se. but i recently started using win98me, i find it to be much faster and more stable.

[Livius]

1. What is Win98ME?

2. Damn that Live! I cannot find any way out with it. I'll try a Vortex2 today and if it works I'll stick by it, although if there was a piece of hardware I really loved in that setup it was the Live! But the simple fact that DMA failed to work when the Live was stuck in the mobo, without even being installed, makes me seriously doubt that they will ever match.

[Jammrock]

Livius,

First off, not all of the recalled drives from WD are listed on their site. I had a 27 GB WD Expert go bad and when I called WD for an RMA the guy I talked to said that the drive was under recall. If you think it may be a problem with the drive, call WD.

Second, when you use a third party IDE driver (i.e. a non-Microsoft IDE driver), the DMA button may show up, but just may not be active. What I mean is, the driver may use the same GUI as the MS driver in the Device Manager, but it may have an autodetect for UDMA modes instead of a user checkbox. Or it could just be crappy drivers.

At least that's how it is for AMD IDE drivers for the Athlon board and AMD chipsets. You may want to run some hard drive benchmarks and see how it performs.

Jammrock

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Athlon 650, Biostar board, 128 MB PC133 (Crucial), G400 32 MB DH, SB Live! w/ Digital I/O, 10/100 NIC, lots of case fans, etc...

[This message has been edited by Jammrock (edited 15 March 2000).]

[Compton]

ME is millenium edition. it's the latest revision of 98 and it's supposed to be out in may. Right now it's in beta and available thru certain channels for evaluation purposes.

[Livius]

Hi again!

1. The WD's fine. It works now. Benchmarks like SiSoft Sandra (and not only, but that's a short test so it's good for my purposes) indicate when DMA is enabled or not.

2. 133A + G400 + Vortex2 combo works. I'll stick by it.

3. Is the beta ME stable enough? At least as stable as the SE?