PCA Forums

I am having some problems here.
I recently installed a Geforce2 Ti (64MB) into my system.
I have the newest NVIDIA detonator driver installed - 40.72
Lately I have been having trouble playing some games.
Madden 2003
NOLF 2
Battlefield 1942
Max Payne
Red Faction
The Thing
etc.........
What happens is that the game installs fine. You get ready to run the game and it will run OK the first time until you get about 10 seconds into the game and then it will either kick you to the desktop or it will show the Blue Screen of Death and restart. On subsequent runnings of the game it won't even get into the game for a second or two before it kicks me out.

Sometimes on the blue screen it will say:
"DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL"
"NV4_disp.dll" (which is the NVIDIA driver?)
But I can't read it all before it restarts the computer.

There are no conflicts that I can see.

System Specs:
Athlon 1.2
512 MB Ram
KT7A-RAID
Geforce2 Ti
Acoustic Edge
Win XP

Any ideas on what to do or where to go for help would be greatly appreciated.

fan working on it?

Greg

yes, the fan is working.

Some general suggestions:

- I recommend the Nvidia reference drivers over the manufacturer's. Do NOT use beta or leaked drivers - use only the latest official reference drivers. Get them here: http://www.nvidia.com/view.asp?PAGE=drivers

- Remove any utilities for your old video card from the Add/Remove Programs wizard in control panel.

- If you're overclocking (either the vid card or the cpu), don't and see if that helps.

- In the motherboard's BIOS menu, make sure that "Assign IRQ to VGA" is enabled and that both "Video BIOS Caching" and "Video Ram Shadow" are disabled. Set "AGP Aperature" to 64 (default).

- The Geforce does NOT like to share an IRQ with other devices - make sure it's the only card using it's IRQ. If you can't change the IRQ for the conflicting card in Device Manager, then you must move the card to another slot.

- Go to the motherboard manufacturer's web site and see if there's an updated Flash BIOS for your mobo. It could be your AGP bus support isn't up to spec. NVidia cards are fussy about proper AGP support.

- You may not have the proper or the latest drivers for you motherboard's APG to PCI Bridge. There should be drivers that came with your motherboard on a CD, but you should download the latest version from the motherboard manufacurer's web site.

- It's possible that some other device is causing the problem. Best way to isolate it is to pull ALL your cards except the vid card (IMPORTANT: note what slot each card was installed in). Play the misbehaving game and see if it runs stable (yes, the game should run just fine without a sound card installed). If it behaves, install each card ONE BY ONE starting with the sound card until you isolate the bad boy. It's important to put the cards back in their original slots to avoid PCI IRQ Sharing problems (see next paragraph).

- You may have a card that has a PCI IRQ channel sharing problem (NOT the same as an IRQ conflict). The SBLive, NICs and SCSI controllers are very prone to this. Fix is essentially the same as mentioned in the previous paragraph except when you find the misbehaving card, you need to move it to another slot. More details on this problem here: http://soldcentralfl.com/quakecoop/glfaq5.htm#5_9

- You may have background app running causing problems. I like to run a very clean system when play - I want NOTHING running in the background. Don't run anything in the background: Virus Scanners, disk utils, reminder programs, taskbar shortcuts for Real Player, AOL Instant Messenger, etc). If you have Win98 run MSCONFIG.EXE click on the Startup tab. Uncheck anything you don't need running - Windows ONLY requires System Tray, Task Monitor and Power Profile to run properly (and you can lose Power Profile if your computer doesn't use sleep mode). Uncheck everything else unless it's required by something.

- Your Power Supply may not be providing enough current. Also older motherboards (Intel LX, Socket 7, AMD K6) can't provide enough current for Geforce cards.

- You should also check out the Geforce FAQ at http://geforcefaq.com

Hope this helps...

I am going to be trying your suggestions over the next few days.
Specifically remove all other cards and try them one at a time.

What is a good temp for CPU? (mine is at 57 Celcius)

Also that GerforceFAQ link doesn't seem to work (I was at the site another time) but now it just seems to be all ads for buying video cards. I might be missing something.

http://www.technologyvault.co.uk/geforc ... ef&lang=en

Is this thew site you were talking about?

Thanks for your help
I will let you know what worked.

Looks like some squatters stole the domain, but the Geforce FAQ is now being maintained here:
http://www.technologyvault.co.uk/

Click on the GeforceFAQ link at the top of the page.