I picked up an AMD-based PC with an 850MHz slot A Athlon. The only thing I'm not too crazy about is its ATI Rage LT Pro AGP card.
dan k
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OK, soooooo . . . I'm a PC noobie . . .
I picked up an AMD-based PC with an 850MHz slot A(?) Athlon. The only thing I'm not too crazy about is its ATI Rage LT Pro AGP card. I think the AGP slot is 1x-2x, though the manual's specs don't say . . .
Nowhere does it say anything about the AGP spec, so I'll take a wild guess and suggest it's AGPv1.0.
I've got several PC-ROMed AGP cards, including an R7K and an Nvidia GF4 Ti4200. Thing is, the PC dun't seem to want to work with either of those installed. The thing gives some beeps (? 1 long, then (?) 3 short?), then just sits there.
Anyone have an idea why? I thought graphics cards like the R7K and GF4Ti would support most any AGP slot. Googling was useless, there's so much noise gathered with any sort of relevant search.
TIA,
dan k
AGP cards are required to be backwards compatible as far as speeds. They will just throttle down. The problems come in when they are used with the wrong voltage. There are 3.3 , 1.5 , and 0.8 . This might be helpful.
http://www.neoseeker.com/Hardware/faqs/kb/10,63.html
That board has 2x AGP.
Here's some more specs on it:
http://www.mainboard.cz/mb/shuttle/AI61.htm
WARNING: the above link contains adult-themed advertisements which may or may not contain nudity.
so why doesn't the confounded thing start up with either of my two more modern AGP cards installed? (R7K and GF4 Ti4200) I still haven't tried the GF4 Ti4600 from my other PC in it, but I don't expect any better results.
And what do the startup tones tell me? I tried it again (R7K) and got a long tone followed by 2 very short tones.
As you can see, I really don't even know what questions to ask! Sigh . . .
dan k
The tones should be documented in the motherboard manual. If they're not, then, well, the manual sucks. Try searching for "BIOS error beep", for instance. You'll get things like this:
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1223
Another page on AGP compatability:
http://www.ertyu.org/~steven_nikkel/agpcompatibility.html
A motherboard that old probably only works with 3.3v compatible cards. Keying *should* prevent you from inserting an incompatible card, but I will say I have seen motherboards which lacked keying on the AGP slot. Assuming everything's properly keyed, then, well, there's no
reason it shouldn't work. Try upgrading the system's BIOS if there's a newer one available.
Those really old AMD chipsets could be *really* flakey, incedentally. Good luck.
--Peace.
Heh, yeah, the manual does suck.
Thanks Eudi for the advice, and the links - at that first url it says 1 long, 2 short = video problem. Heh, uh, yeah.
This is what comes of buying crap about which I know little. I just wanted a cheap gaming PC for my nephews, not another source of persistant anal itching. Grrr.
Well, I'll see if the BIOS is older than the available update, and update it if it is, though I hold out little hope.
Assuming that's useless, anyone have any suggestions for a cheap LB/CPU combo to replace this POS? Preferably it'd use SDRAM (which I already have) and something 1GHz or faster would be nice (are those incompatible?) The box is otherwise well equipped.
sigh . . .
dan k
Just to rule out the obvious:
I know this will sound dumb, but... make sure you're seating the new cards completely into the slot. I've had this problem with AGP more then once, where it feels like it's in there, but it actually needs one last *ooph*.
--Peace
Check your motherboard's manual to see if you can set a jumper for "Voodoo" cards. Many motherboards of this era needed a higher voltage pumped to the AGP slot, as required by Voodoo 3 and above cards.
JB
Take out the video card completely and start the machine. Compare the beeps you get with no video card installed vs. when the card is in the machine. That could rule out an ill-seated card.
This may be somewhat obvious, but is the BIOS set to look for an AGP card? I know in some BIOSes that there is a toggle to use AGP vs. PCI video. If it's set to auto, manually tell the BIOS to use the AGP slot. You'd be surprised what that little switch can fix.
So much for plug n' play, huh?
Cheers,
The Czar