Video card changing from 16MB to 32MB?!!?!?!

[Celeron_Phreak]

Video card changing from 32MB to 16MB?!!?!?!

I activated System BIOS Cacheable and Video BIOS Cacheable on my video card yesterday and when I restarted to boot to windows, I didn't get anything. No boot splash screen or anything. So I removed the card and put it back in and I had something. But the screen had vertical lines all over the screen about 1cm apart and I still couldn't get into windows, just the POST and teh windows splash screen. So I removed the card again and let it sit for five minutes and put it back in. There, a clean image and I can get into windows. So I restarted once more to be sure everything was okay and before the POST, the video BIOS says that the card is only a 16MB! This card has always said 32MB (which is what it is) until now. I flashed my motherboard BIOS with the latest version and still nothing.

But when I tried to use the ASUS BIOS flashing utilities, I always get an error message saying "cannot open driver service". I don't notice any differance when gaming in Quake 3 at full graphics though. So I think the card's BIOS chip is just reporting things wrong. My older brother did update the BIOS at one time, so could that be why?

All help is appreciated.
Thanks,
David I.

 

[WA2]

Is it onboard video? You prob jsut have shared mem set wrong.

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

No. It's an AGP video card that goes in the slot. Runs at 4x like it always has and should.

 

[WA2]

What do the advanced properties in your display settings say about the mem?

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

Same thing. 16MB. This is getting really annoying. I'm pretty much positive that the video BIOS chip got messed with and it's just reporting things wrong. I hope so at least :-\

 

[DaddyB]

Hate to suggest the obvious but have you tried to disable video bios cachable and system bios cachable?

Those should be disabled, all caching and shadowing should be disabled (don't disable the "cache", as in L1 or L2 cache but do disable anything that says ___ bios cachable or anything that mentions shadowing).

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

Yes, I disabled the caching, but I cannot control the shadowing stuff with my BIOS.

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

Okay. After trying to put the card in AMD Phreaks comp to flash the BIOS, I put it back in mine and now the card wants to stay being a 32MB card. But it still has vertical lines all over the screen. I removed teh 6600 from the computer and now I'm using an old 2MB S3 Trio64V+ PCI video card. At least I can still web browse, chat, and listen to music. Ugh, so ****ed off right now.

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

It's just gotta be the BIOS on the card. Anyone know of any DOS based BIOS flash utility for GeForce 256s or the ASUS v6600??

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

Okay. I was really bored and depressed yesterday night, so I pulled the GeForce out of the anti-static bag it's been sitting in and decided to pop the RAM sinks off. After doing that, I looked at the pins, and it looks as if some of the RAM pins had been bridged, from cutting away teh masking tape when we epoxied them on. So I took a very small exacto knife blade and slipped the tip of it inbetween each of teh bridged pins being very careful not to break any. I slapped the card back in, and no more black lines! XD. So then I went to let it boot. I got a BSOD. So I messed with using it in safe mode for about an hour and a half. I found that uninstalling the GeForce from safe mode, then restarting in normal mode, would let me boot, most of the time.

I noticed something weird though. Whenever I'd try to load safe mode with networking, it'd always restart after loading the AGP440 something something driver. So I think it had something to do with the network card. I could never get windows to boot after letting the card be installed from windows normal mode and restarting again though.

Well, I reinstalled windows XP from safe mode last night and I fell asleep during it. I woke up at 4 AM to see the BSOD on my monitor, saying "Unmountable Boot Volume". I shut it off, and went back to sleep. This morning, I turned it back on, and it booted windows prefectly fine and I finished the install of XP. Then I restarted the comptuer once more, and it worked. So I installed the detonator drivers and restarted. I got the BSOD!. So I just restarted again and it booted windows. Then I installed the coolbits extension, and did a little playing around with some of those 64kb 3D demos. Been working fine so far, but I'm afraid to restart now. What should I do, do a fresh reinstall of XP? I'd really hate to go through THAT again.

~C.P.

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

Well, looks like the card is no good, at least for Windows XP. Whenever I put the card back in, I always get the BSOD while windows tries to boot, saying "unmountable_boot_volume". I still don't see why the video card causes this problem.

 

[hUMANbEATbOX]

by bsod, do you just mean the unmountale_boot_volume screen? if so, its fixable.

type unmountable_boot_volume into google. you will find an answer.

 

[Beast Of Blight]

The video card is haunted *insert scary halloween sounds here*

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

hahaha

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

Hey Hey!!! I got the video card working! All I can say is...

THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!!!


hUMANbEATbOX: if you hadn't recomended me to search for that, I would never had remembered what I did to my computer. I forgot that when I added the RAMsinks to the GPU side, I also swapped out the 80 wire HD cable for a 40 wire, cause the 80 wire had a loose connection on one of the connectors. so sometimes the computer wouldn't see my hard drive. Apparently windows didn't like it, so I tightened that connector on the 80 wire cable it it works now.

I still don't see why it only acted up when I put the GeForce back in, and it worked fine when I removed it.

But THANK YOU for all your help! Special thanks go to hUMANbEATbOX

~C.P.

BTW, I've never given up on anything I've really tried to fix. And every time I've really tried to fix something, it always ends up working again. Lets just hope this fix lasts awhile.

 

[Daven]

The video card is haunted *insert scary halloween sounds here*

lol, ive been seeing allot of "haunted" things go up on e-bay, just put it up as a haunted video card and make some cash

 

[Celeron_Phreak]

lol. I've noticed a lot of ASUS v6600s like mine up there and they are/were all screwed cause of lines going accross the screen. From what I've heard, lines accross the screen is a memory related problem. So I bet cha that someone tried overclocking the memory to hard on those and screwed 'em up.

 

[hUMANbEATbOX]

heh, i don't know much, but i'm glad i could help