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AGP speed ignore BIOS setting

FoxEye

FoxEye

FoxEye

Caporegime
Joined
17 Feb 2006
Posts
29,263
Location
Cornwall
Hey there.

Trying to resolve a problem with an old PC I've been given to fix.

I know the Sapphire 9600XT AGP 8x support is really flaky, and causes continual crashing (VPU recover kicks in every 2 minutes). This on an ASUS VIA KT600 chipset board.

So I set the AGP speed to 4x in the BIOS.

I re-boot XP (now SP3), and check CPU-Z to see what AGP speed is really set to. Low and behold, it's reading 8x. And the desktop is crashing repeatedly, so I know CPU-Z is telling the truth.

I uninstall all ATI drivers. Only driver now present is MS own CPU-to-AGP driver, that comes with XP. There is no option to set AGP speed from within the driver that I noticed.

I reboot. CPU-Z tells me AGP is still 8x. BIOS is ignored.

So now I update to VIA's own CPU-to-AGP driver (viaagp1.sys). I reboot. I load CPU-Z and... mobo running in 8x mode. Crashing still.

I give up, and replace CPU-to-AGP driver to PCI-to-PCI driver. This very slow, but prevents crashing. It's horrible hack tho.

My question is, why is BIOS setting of 4x being completely ignored? I check to make sure ATI Smart service is not running - it isn't.

Which is responsible for overriding BIOS? XP or driver? Or something I missed?

If anyone can remember how to set AGP speed and have it stick, I'd love to hear how. Thanks.
 
A long time ago I had a via KT800? motherboard I think and tried to get a 9800xt working and i never did !
 
IIRC could you not do this from within Rivatuner?

EDIT - yes, I am almost certain this is possible, done from within Low Level AGP Settings, or something similar.
 
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As long as agp driver has been instaled with the via drivers, the ati driver should show the smartgart section to control agp settings.
 
I deliberately haven't installed CCC, because I don't like it. Thing requires .net to run and probably slows everything down. Or so I hear.
 
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