Soyo K7V Dragon+ and GF4 4200 = 3d game lockups

[Supra]

I just decided to upgrade my powercolor gf2 pro to a visiontek 64mb gf4 4200. I thought it would be a good idea but it has been nothing but problems. I removed my old drivers and used Det destroyer to remove everything, shut off comp, installed gf4, booted up, installed drivers that came with card, rebooted again, went to play UT2003 demo and 2 secs into intro it locked up. Ctrl-Alt-Del cant do anything, i have to press restart button. All other games it locks up within 10 seconds. 3dmark2001 makes it about halfway thru the first benchmark and then starts artifacting and then locks up. I'm thinking its the infinite loop error so I have been bouncing off of message boards all over and i've found many people are having probs with soyo dragon mobos and gf4 cards in combination. Ive emailed visiontek and i am waiting for a reply. I'm running win98se. If any1 can help i would very much appreciate it.

 

[Vehementi]

Are there any IRQ conflicts within your Device Manager?

 

[Supra]

Even though device manager says there isn't I know there is because visiontek video cards cannot share an irq with another device no matter what it is. Originally it was sharing an IRQ with my onboard network card and my onboard soundcard(IRQ 11). Right now I have my onboard NIC and sound disabled and I'm using a PCI network card(IRQ 11=damnit) and sound card(IRQ 10) that has the same chip as the onboard sound does. I cant change irq's in windows and I dont understand how to change them in my bios because soyo had to make it as confusing as possible. I'm still waiting on a reply from visiontek and im gonna go email soyo right now.

 

[Vehementi]

You can't do it within your BIOS? Check Soyo's website, or contact their tech support team.
Device Manager - Right click your video card, go to properties, then the Resources tab. I suppose you've tried that though.

 

[Supra]

Visiontek told me this:
--------------------------------------------
In motherboard bios:
Experiment with AGP aperture size in system bios
Experiment with AGP x-fer mode (1x, 2x, 4x)
Enable/disable AGP fast writes (if applicable)
"Load bios default values" in motherboard setup.
Try to get the card to post on IRQ 11 by itself in the bios post screen
before windows loads.


Try the card in another system
Try the 29.42 drivers from NVIDIA's website (in driver archive section).
Be sure all remnants of previous video card drivers are gone. To be sure, a
reformat of drive is strongly encouraged.
Consider a bios update for your motherboard as well.
---------------------------------------------
I've done all of that except change the x-fer mode and reformatting of my hard drive. Why would I want AGP x-fer modes of 1 or 2x with a Geforce 4, wouldn't it be a bottleneck? If I was garanteed it would work after a format then I would do it but there are none.

 

[Supra]

Visiontek emailed me again and they told me the only way they got thier card to be stable on a soyo dragon was to load all BIOS defaults and reformat the computer. I knew I shouldn't have payed $150 for this POS mobo, shoulda got an epox like my last comp had.