For some strange reason, my Geforce DDR card (AGP) is reading in Hardware Properties as being on the PCI bus. I tried recently to load a game demo from this month's Maximum PC magazine CD, but it says that it isn't detecting a 3D card. Any opinions or advice would be greatly appreciated. When I try to load the latest drivers from Nvidia or Asus, the system crashes continuously.

P.S. Fresh Diagnose also crashes the system now.

cmos

Go into CMOS and make sure that your video card setting is set for AGP instead of PCI. I know that my board has a setting under CMOS to select AGP or PCI. It may need to be changed to AGP. I don't know why it would already be set for PCI instead of AGP being default unless someone changed it. Wouldn't make a whole lot of sense. Worth taking a look at though.

Latest vid card and chipset drivers installed?

This vid card setting in BIOS is just to tell the system which video card to use as primary when you happen to have an AGP and a PCI card at the same time. Setting it manually to correct value does solve some problems sometimes though.

still the same...

I just replaced a pci card with this card. CMOS was set to PCI for the primary video adapter. However, after setting it to AGP, device manager in Windows still shows the card to be located at PCI bus 1. Is this in direct relation to the instability/poor performance of the video card? Or are the drivers to blame. As I mentioned before, I have tried installing nvidia's latest drivers, as well as Asus's, the vid board manufacturer. The system becomes very unstable and freezes or crashes right after installation. The driver I have to revert to is the driver loaded by Win XP. I'm at a loss for what to attempt next.

Did you uninstall the drivers for the previous before installing the new card ?

If all else fails, it might be a good idea to re-install the system completely ( OS, Drivers, etc ... ). Have you done so when replacing the PCI card ?

I can't remember if I uninstalled the previous drivers or not. It's probably not a good sign that I have doubt about that, is it? When you say do a reinstall of the OS, you mean reformatting and doing a clean re-install, right? I really don't want to have to do that unless there is absolutely no other alternative. Is there no other possible alternative? I have to admit, though, that with my current configuration, my old TNT2 card gave me better performance than the Geforce DDR is giving me now.

Uninstall the current drivers. After the then reboot, do a search for nv*.* files in your system directory & delete all the files you find ( they should all be nVIDIA files, but you might still want to check before deleting them ).

Once you've done that, re-install the drivers & see if the issues has been resoved.

Instead of searching for nvidia files manually just go to www.guru3d.com and download the latest version of Detonator Destroyer. It will remove any left over nvidia driver files after you have uninstalled the drivers.