NVIDIA Detonators & Intel Chipset Utility incompatibility with ASUS P4PE-L.

I just recently bought an ASUS P4PE-L motherboard with an Intel P4 2.53B CPU. After sucessful installation of Windows 2000, I installed Nvidia Detonators 40.72 and rebooted (everything worked fine). I then proceeded to install the Intel Chipset drivers off the Asus CD. Everything worked fine then I rebooted, from then I was unable to enter windows through normal mode, only safe mode. I went into safe mode and uninstall the detonator drivers, which allowed me to get back into normal mode but using a VGA driver. I then went on to install an alternate Nvidia detonator driver, and the same problem occured, I was unable to enter windows (would freeze at logo screen).

So I reinstalled windows once again, installed SP3 and other relevant drivers. Then I installed the same 40.72 detonators and rebooted (this time without the Intel Chipset Drivers). Everything worked, I played a few games just to make sure. So after making sure everything was working fine, I tried to install a newer version of the Intel Chipset drivers. So I did and rebooted, and was unable to enter windows once again. So I went into safe mode, uninstalled the detonators and I was able to boot once again.

This is my 3rd win2k installation since and I am still not running the Intel Chipset Drivers. I did some benchmarks and only got 7600 3D marks, and 6800 after installing Intel Application Accelerator. My system specs are as follows;

Asus P4PE-L Motherboard
512MB Ram DDR266 (Samsung) SPD rating 2-3-3-6
MSI Geforce 4 TI4200 128MB
Antec 1080AMG Case with Antec True 430W PSU
SB Live Value 2

After running sisoft sandra tests, it prompted me with the following 'errors'

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Warning W2513 - The AGP bus is disabled.
Fix: If you have an AGP mainboard, you should get a AGP video adapter to take advantage of it. An AGP adapter would greatly improve 3D performance. However, it should still have at least 8-16MB of local memory.

Tip T2525 - Current AGP data rate not optimal, i.e. less than chipset’s maximum AGP data rate. E.g. current AGP data rate is 1x while the chipset and the AGP card both support 2x. You should get better performance with a higher data rate but this depends on the application.

Fix: First, use the PCI & AGP Information module to confirm that the AGP card also supports the maximum chipset data rate. If it does not, don’t worry about it. For non-Intel chipsets, make sure you install the latest version of their AGP mini-drivers. You should update the video card drivers as well. Some non-Intel chipsets can only work in 1x mode with some video cards.
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Also when I compared my cpu with others close to it (2.4 and 2.66) mine peformed equally to a 2.4, though the flops score was lower by about 500 points.

If ANYBODY has any clues, please help, I am completely at a loss and I need to resolve this problem ASAP because this is my workstation.

Did you ever try installing the chipset drivers first...?

Yes during my first installation I installed the chipset drivers first.

One thing I forgot to mention is that a friend of mine and I did ogg encoding tests, he has an 2100 XP and I a 2.53 P4, his result was 43s and mine was 61s, that's a full 40% slower than his machine, while athlons are very speedy this is not what I should be getting, if anything my machine should beat his.

Also, when windows prompted me with "new hardware found" (that being the video card), I was able to use 256 color mode but not 16 and 32. As soon as I switched to either of those, I would get weird static noise from my soundcard and the video display would corrupt and freeze the system.

[PiTHON]

you need to download the 1002 bios update from their site, i was having the same problems with windows xp.

everything worked fine (xp has a really old driver w/o opengl support for the video driver but still supports 32bit color and res changes n stuff) so the last thing i loaded was the video driver... rebooted and had some weird graphical glitches (it locked up with lines and dots everywhere) after restoring a bunch of times and reloading xp, trying different drivers for video monitor - everything, i could also only boot into vga mode with it loaded, i finally updated to the latest bios and everything worked fine.

that was after restoring too, i didn't format again after updating the bios, i was goin to but got lazy after troubleshooting for a few hours =) everythings runnin great

[Riptide]

The first part of the original post seems to indicate drivers are getting installed before the inf package. If that is true that is a baddy...

[Lars]

I just got a P4PE this week, and I'm quite happy with it. It has the 1002 bios and it works great with both GF3, GF4 and even R9700PRO. I've tried all 3 of them with quite a few different drivers in the 40/41 series for the 2 GF3/4 cards.

Also I've used both the 4.007 and the 4.012 chipset drivers and both worked fine. I had heaps of trouble with my sligthly aging Abit TH7-II. A thing to note though, is that I still have problems with all the cards if I use the "66/33" agp/pci clock when overclocking. If I set it to "auto" it works just fine, regardless of fsb from 133-168. So you may want to look into the agp/pci speed settings there. It's worth a shot IMO.