Matrox G450 AGP Freezing

[jazzyb88]

Hi all,

I have exhausted all i know for this card, i have tried Linux SuSE 9.3, WinXP and Win2k. So far i've narrowed down driver issues to being the culprit as under Linux SuSE the graphics card would not lock the OS up.

Under Win2k the card would run fine, but as soon as i installed the latest Matrox drivers it would start locking up just like XP would. Under XP i tried the default and the latest Matrox drivers but both to no avail.

My system specs are:

Supermicro P6DGE Motherboard
Dual 800Mhz PIII
Matrox G450 AGP Dualhead English
Win2k (currently)
Adaptec SCSI Card
C-Media 8738 Sound Card
Seagate 30Gb Harddrive
250w Fortron PSU

I am quite puzzled by this because i initially installed XP when i got the system and it was running fine on the XP native drivers, but as soon as i added my soundcard the system started to fail. The soundcard is located on the bottom PCI slot (which is actually PCI2). Don't know if there is an IRQ problem here, but i shouldn't think so as the graphics card is AGP and it worked under Linux.

I installed the C-Media soundcard drivers under XP and 2k to see if that helped but the problem continued. I've removed the Matrox drivers using their uninstaller utility and then reinstalled the native XP and Matrox drivers after the XP drivers failed yet again.

I've updated the Matrox card BIOS to the latest version but that didn't help either.

[UtwigMU]

Maybe the slots are sharing INT numbers, try moving the soundcard arround.

[jazzyb88]

I'll try that, but it doesn't really explain why it worked under Linux and Windows without any drivers. Thanks for the speedy response though.

[UtwigMU]

Most likely because drivers use features of AGP bus such as fast writes, etc... which generic drivers didn't use, this is one possible explanation.

[jazzyb88]

Is there a way to disable all those features, the BIOS doesn't seem to show anything about that.

[Dilitante1]

Win uses irq sharing, does *nix?

PSU looks weak for dual too.....

[jazzyb88]

The PSU is adequate, it is a Fortron and as you know the rails are quite stable...i did check those in the BIOS and they were all within 5% tolerance either way.

I did fix the problem however thanks to UtwigMU. I swapped the soundcard to another PCI slot and the problem went away (i trialed with removing it at first and then changed it to another slot).

I guess i might have a dodgey slot on my motherboard? Anyway, thanks for your help guys.