Geforce FX 5500 graphics corruption problem solved! Woohoo!

[colinhopkins]

MSI 6561 (745 Ultra)
AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (Tbred)
256 Kingston PC 2700 DDR
Nvidia Geforce FX 5500 128MB (64-bit....boo!)
WD 80GB
WD 20GB
24x10x40 CD-R
40x DVD

I have been going nuts trying to figure out why my new Geforce FX 5500 was giving me so much trouble in 3D games in Windows XP. The card would simply not run games when set to AGP4X, and would either lock up with the notorious "MSVisual C+ runtime error" in OpenGL or I would get tearing and artifacts in Direct3D.

I removed the rather crummy heatsink/fan that came on the card and replaced it with a much better one, using silver thermal compound.

I tried using every chipset driver that supported the 745, every Nvidia driver that supported the Geforce FX 5500.

I did a clean install of Windows XP and then service pack 2.

I moved cards around on the PCI bus to see if getting the video card it's own IRQ would help.

I removed all of my other cards except the video card to see if there was a conflict.

I switched to a larger power supply.

I edited the video card's bios to disable fastwrites and sideband addressing.

Nothing helped! The card worked flawlessly in 2D at AGP 4X, but the only way to get the 3D graphics to run without crashing was to set the AGP rate to 1X in the bios setup.


The part that was really starting to annoy me came after I installed Fedora Core 2 on my second drive. The card ran flawlessly at AGP 4X! This was really getting ridiculous!

After reading what must have been 1000 posts around the 'net by people with similar problems on many different chipsets, I noticed one post by someone that had exactly the same problem as me, but on a VIA chipset motherboard. He said that disabling the onboard sound in Windows XP using the device manager made the graphics corruption problem go away.

I tried the same thing and changed the AGP rate back up to 4X, and the thing ran perfectly. So all of this time, the onboard audio has been causing the problem! Realizing just how many people use the onboard audio these days, it all clicked.

I removed all of the onbard audio drivers from my system, including the registry entries. AGP 4X works perfectly!

Evidently, there is a problem somewhere in the way XP handles some onboard audio drivers that interferes with AGP data. An easy fix for many people out there would probably be to get a cheap soundcard and disable onboard audio. Hope this helps someone out there.

[saturnotaku]

Older onboard audio solutions can be problematic in a variety of respects. With Soundstorm and the Realteck ALC850, it's not really a problem any more. But this is good advice for people who have problems. The Turtle Beach Santa Cruz can be had for dirt cheap at e-tailers or eBay. I would recommend that over a Sound Blaster Live on older machines.

[colinhopkins]

Yep, I remember back a few years when the Vortex 2 was causing a lot of problems on VIA chipsets, and also with Nvidia cards. I switched to using onboard sound after getting a new VIA board and wrestling with that issue for entirely too long.

Funny thing about the onboard audio/Geforce FX conflict is that this never happened with the same setup running a Geforce 2 Pro. Go figure.

[saturnotaku]

Originally Posted by colinhopkins

Yep, I remember back a few years when the Vortex 2 was causing a lot of problems on VIA chipsets, and also with Nvidia cards.

This was only a problem for me when I switched to Windows 2000. I never had a problem with my Vortex 2, GeForce2 Ultra and KT133A board under Windows 98. By the time I switched, Creative had bought out Aureal and there was no more driver support for the Vortex 2, which is a shame because that was the best sound card I've ever owned.