Diamond S120 Problems in Vista

[chuckdogg80]

Hi,
I am new here. I just renovated my entire system to the following core equipment:

Biostar K8M800 MB
AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+ Black (not Oc'd yet)
2GB RAM
Diamond Stealth S120 256MB AGP video

My problem is this. The video card is crap. I keep getting a message that the ati driver has stopped responding and successfully restarted. All the while the display flashes in and out of black. I have tried several different versions of the ATI Catalyst drivers, with no luck. I saw in a review on Cnet that someone changed their CPU to AGP bridge to a PCI to PCI bridge, but I cannot find any further information on that. Can anyone offer any help? Thanks in advance.
Chuck

 

[Exhnozoaa]

Gah! I had just about finished writing a response including a pretty detailed guide on the bridge thing when my computer had to be restarted (it was once of the last steps and I was doing them as I wrote them).

Oh well, I had started out with saying is that I have the same video card and it commonly has issues just like yours.
I also said that the bridge thing only seems to work in Win2k and XP, and does NOT work properly in Vista (I just tried it and it's not working, Vista no longer recognizes the card at all).

For those with Win2k or XP who would like a guide on changing the CPU to AGP bridge to a PCI-to-PCI bridge, I will give an abbreviated version of the guide:

Find the Device Manager (you can get to it from right-clicking My Computer and choosing properties. it should be on one of the tabs).
Find System Devices, expand it, find the CPU to AGP bridge.
Rick-click it, choose Properties.
Click the Device tab, then Update Driver.
Go through the wizard (I have Vista so am not completely sure what to do in XP or 2k) and figure out how to choose from a list of drivers.
Pick PCI-to-PCI bridge from the list of drivers.
Finish with the wizard.
Now you may have to reboot.

Voila, you're Diamond S120 should be more stable now. If not, go through the same steps, but reverse anything mentioning the PCI-to-PCI bridge and CPU to AGP, and things should be back to normal.