PNY GeForce 5500 AGP games distortions

[Loma]

I've recently installed a new PNY Verto GeForce 5500 AGP 128MB videocard on my PC (Athlon 1700, 256MB Ram, MoBo-DFI AD75, SBLive 5.1 sound, DirectX 9c). I've installed drivers from card's CD.
when I start Deadly Dozen, the intro image looks messy, blurry, and with a red hue. It's worse when I start NFS U. The red hue appears and disappears and the cars are "unidentifyable". Only some lines, triangles are shown. The sound is ok. Screen Captures
I've installed the latest drivers from NVidia. Nothing changes. I've installed some AGP drivers from Motherboard's CD. No changes.

Pls advise if it is a hardware or a driver/software problem. Have any ideas how to solve the probl?
Thanks

 

[Rik]

That is probably a driver problem. Did you uninstall your old graphics drivers before fitting the new card?

 

[Loma]

At first, I didn't.
But after I encountered the problems, I've fully uninstalled all video drivers from the system, and reinstalled the new ones, provided on the card's CD.

 

[Rik]

you will probably need to boot in to safe mode (press F8 when windows is just starting) and see if there are any old drivers left. They often dont show up in normal mode.

 

[Loma]

ooops, sorry, I forget.
I got a new HD too, and it was a clean install of WinXp with the graphic card plugged in. So there're no old drivers left.

 

[Loma]

I've just red yr post "Read This if you are getting a new graphics card " and I'm afraid it could be the static electricity that damaged my card. I didn't took care of it while installing the card.

 

[Rik]

Its a possiblility, but if the card has never worked properly then i doubt its the cause. Try running dxdiag by clicking on your start button, selectiong run, then type "dxdiag". Then click the display tab at the top and look there. You can click on "test direct draw" and "test direct 3d" to see if it all works ok.

 

[Loma]

I did 'dxdiag' and almost all tests went smooth exept for one of the Direct 3D tests (that uses 8 or 9 interfaces, don't remember exactly), when the bouncing box got frozen. I used ESC or even Ctrl+Alt+Del to exit.

 

[Rik]

Id suggest downloading the latest directx from microsoft.com, its worth a try. Maybe there is a problem with directx?!?!

 

[Loma]

The latest DirectX is 9.0c and I have it installed. I'll try to reinstall it.

 

[Loma]

What do you say about below opinion?:

"Others may be able to shed more light on this subject. But, here's some experience I've had with VIA. I need to mention that below is only the most recent episode but I've had plenty of others in the past as well.

It's times like this that VIA drives me insane. The most likely cause is the chipset or chipset drivers (INFs). For some reason many older (and even some newer) VIA chipsets have a real problem with certain videocards and properly configuring the AGP bus.

Now, usually, most VIA problems happen with VIA chipset + ATI videocard. But, you may be that rare exception, VIA chipset + NVIDIA videocard with issues.

A friend has the ECS PM800-M2 powered by the VIA PM800 chipset. The only thing that makes the system perfectly stable is to turn off AGP! That's right, the videocard works (slowly) but without any AGP functionality.

Okay, so what's the fix that works most of the time? Well the following. But, on occasion games still crash. Regardless, AGP off = perfect stability, AGP on requires the following steps to work most (95%) of the time without crashing:

Windows XP SP2 (fresh install)
VIA chipset drivers - Version 500A (includes AGP INFs)
Videocard drivers - ATI Catalyst 5.6 (AGP drivers), you want the NVIDIA ForceWare v71.89
Soundcard, LAN, all other drivers.
That's the best stability I can give him. I know the parts all work. Besides being independently tested and the videocard having been in a perfectly stable second box of my own, everything works fine when AGP is off.

It seems VIA still has a hard time properly implementing AGP functionality and timings. I can only imagine what issues the older KT133 chipset had (has).

The only thing I hope, for VIA's sake is that PCIe being a better laid out bus, doesn't carry these issues they have with AGP over into any PCIe chipset logic of theirs."