Old video card

[Jj4]

Hello. I'm new here and I hope I'm posting in the right place. I am attempting to help a friend with an older computer. They wanted to run a particular screen saver that had a minimum video card requirement of 16megs.

The system they are running is an old timer I put togther for them quite a while ago. Its an Asus Pentium I motherboard P55T2P4 with 96megs of EDO memory. It was running a Diamond Stealth 2meg Video card.

We found an Nvidia TNT M64 16meg card and tried to install it. The system would not even post. No screen at all, just a kind of crackling single or very weak double beep.

I am not that familiar with the Nvidia cards and I do not believe this is a TNT2 version.

I don't believe the motherboard is too old to accept this card as I recall installing a Voodoo 2000 16meg card on one of these motherboards a long time ago.

It is very possible that the card is simply N/G, but I wanted to clarify its compatability (PCI) of course.

thank you,
joe

[The Hip]

The card you have is indeed a TNT2 variant - just look here:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/tnt2.html

May I suggest that you flash your mainboard with the latest available BIOS, and read this particular page:

http://www.jump.net/~lcs/kalle/

I believe the board is PCI spec 2.0 - where your card might PCI spec 2.1.
Good Luck!

[Jj4]

Thanks for your reply. I did see something about the video card being pci 2.1 but I couldn't find the vers. pci on the motherboard. I did see an Asus busmastering slot that shared one of the pci slots that was called 2.0. But yes, I feared this.

Is flashing the bios a way to upgrade pci specs? Hmm, I gotta look into the newest bios upgrade to see what it includes.

thanks again,
joe

[Jj4]

Hi again. In digging a little deeper and trying to understand this PCI spec. I find that the chipset on this old motherboard is the Intel 430HX. at the following page ...

http://developer.intel.com/design/chipsets/mature/430hx/430hx_pb.htm


It says it complys with PCI 2.1 (thats good :drooling: ) but ... I don't know how to confirm it by looking anywhere in device manager (win98se).

Does anyone know if the chipset supports this 2.1 does that preclude that the bios is also set up for it. OR ... even more importantly ... does the bios have anything at all to do with PCI version?

thanks,
joe