Too many Video Cards

[Nitwig]

Ok, here's a new one. I am upgrading a friends system and he didn't want to spend a lot so I got him a Biostar k8m800-m7a socket 754 board and an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ chip. I used his old memory and video card. After installing windows and going into the device manager it lists 8 entries for the video card. It is a Sapphire X800 GTO AGP card. I realize that there should be only two entries. One primary and one secondary. For some reason the motherboard thinks there are 4 video cards installed. If I install the catalyst drivers, I get blue screen of death and have to uninstall them in safe mode. I tried a different video card. This was a BFG FX 5900 and it worked fine. I downgraded the Bios to the newest one from Biostar's website and it does the same thing. Will I have to dump this board and undo my nice wiring job? I can see that this is a hardware incompatibility and may not be resolveable with this hardware combination, but I am hoping not to have to double my work and I don't want to eat the board since I don't need it and the restocking/return shipping wouldn't be worth the effort. The board only cost 30 bucks or so. Just to add I did install the latest chipset drivers.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Too many Video Cards

have you tried repairing windows? after i got a new board and proc it would BSOD on boot up and i ended up having to repair installation.

EDIT: Oh and i switched from two ATI vid cards (one 9200 and one 7500) to one Geforce 6150.

[gastorgrab]

Re: Too many Video Cards

Maybe there is some issue with ATI and that particular Via chipset. I also have a k8m800-m7a running with an NForce card, without problems.
.

[Fizzycapola]

Re: Too many Video Cards

on a noob note, maybe corrupt/conflicting .inf (Windows/Inf:by date:erase things that are new if you dare?), use radeon cleaner / nvidia cleaner... something like that incase it's not a deeper tech problem as it looks.

[bgavin]

Re: Too many Video Cards

Maybe there is some issue with ATI and that particular Via chipset.

VIA chipset... there is a big tip-off, right there.

I gave up on those piece of junk after beating my head against the wall for too long.

[WNG]

Re: Too many Video Cards

Delete all of the entries, reboot. Does the board have a built-in video option?
Disable it in the BIOS. I assume it does since there's a 'm' before the 800.

IIRC, you can't run the built-in video and an external video card simultaneously.

[Nitwig]

Re: Too many Video Cards

Ugghhh. I tried this card in a different motherboard and it shows the same thing. This time I used an nforce 3 board that had no onboard video. I then tested 2 different cards in both motherboards and Everything worked fine. The cards I tested were a geforce fx 5900 and a radeon 9800xt. It is starting to look like a partial video card fry. My friend smokes and the video card had a lot of dust in the heatsink and He plays Counterstrike constantly. Add that to the fact that we had a lot of days over 90 degrees around here and that is probably it for the card.

[Nitwig]

Re: Too many Video Cards

One other thing. This is a brand new installation of windows. Each time I tested the card I reformatted the drive just to be sure that it wasn't a driver issue. I installed the latest direct x, chipset drivers and then video card drivers.

[gdement]

Re: Too many Video Cards

Windows detects plug and play devices by reading the PCI device ID information, which should be shown to you momentarily at the POST screen. Try hitting pause on your keyboard and writing down the Vendor ID, etc. that it lists for your devices. Then look them up online and find out if any of them are incorrect. This can happen sometimes with a glitchy board or PSU, and I've "fixed" it before by moving the offending card to a different slot. It's possible you have multiple devices which are reporting an ID which Windows would identify as a video card.

I've had this problem a couple times before, once with a network card and the other with a sound card. One time it was a power problem (3.0V on 3.3V rail), the other time the card just needed to be reseated.

[edit: Sorry, I just noticed you already had the same problem with the card in a different system. I'll leave my post anyway, in case it helps somehow.]

[Nitwig]

Re: Too many Video Cards

What seems very strange is that The card seems to have failed in a non-standard way. There is no glitching. The card can provide a basic video signal but it reports itself as multiple card. This is not something that I have encountered before. I guess heat can do strange things to video cards.

[gdement]

Re: Too many Video Cards

What seems very strange is that The card seems to have failed in a non-standard way. There is no glitching. The card can provide a basic video signal but it reports itself as multiple card. This is not something that I have encountered before. I guess heat can do strange things to video cards.

Yeah, they confuse me too. I have a TI4200 which works fine if it's accessed as a PCI device, 3D acceleration even works. But if you try to boot Windows with an AGP driver installed, it will hang with a garbled screen at the moment when you'd expect the hires desktop to appear.
Knoppix can run it, and so can Windows if there's no AGP driver. I assume knoppix probably works for the same reason, I don't expect it was booting with AGP support. I just use that card for board testing now, it provides a healthy electrical load even though it won't really run properly in a GUI.

[Logistics]

Re: Too many Video Cards

Try installing Windows without ACPI. When you run the install and it asks if you want to hit F6 to install any drivers, just keep tapping F5 until a screen comes up and asks you if you want to install on a Standard PC or Other; choose Standard. Of course, he will have to actually press the power button when it comes time to shut down. OH NOES!

Edit: Also, I did this ever since my gaming days because it improves your FPS. In fact everything seems to run a bit better without ACPI.

[Nitwig]

Re: Too many Video Cards

Oh well, my friend really wants his computer back so I decided to get him a new video card. Now I have his old one to mess around with.

[valvestate]

Re: Too many Video Cards

a little late but i think this is a good add-on about acpi and performance. with acpi everything ends up sharing irqs when windows enumerates and configures hardware. if theres a less than awesome driver installed, which is just about every driver, irq steering is gonna lag from either little to really bad and making your machine unusable. if you install windows xp with acpi you cant configure device resources manually without any third party utilities (if anyone knows of one please let me know where to get it) as its all in software. you have two choices, install without acpi or disable it (not reversible), or if your motherboard is awesome enough, itll let you assign irqs to each pci irq pin manually. my machine, before my board crapped out from crappy caps and crappy antec SP, would boot xp faster than all the newest machines even with a fresh install. 1.3ghz AXP 1500+ & 266fsb, 2x8gb 5400 caviars in a stripe with a 60gb and 120gb for storage, a junk g450 dualhead, 512mb corsair xms cl2 underclocked and tightened at 266mhz, sblive, intel pro100 nic, usb input devices, and a plextor 24x cdrw. it smoked everyones machines i knew at load times and stability. so screw acpi and plug'n'pray. theyre the shittiest things ever made. most machines dont use up all the irqs available anyways. disable serial ports and lpt. dont even turn on the floppy unless youre gonna memtest. irq sharing is like cutting a sitck of butter in half, yea you have more pieces but each piece is smaller.

sorry for the rant. x86 is a skyscraper supported by popsicle sticks and scotch tape. it just bugs the hell outta me.

[Logistics]

Re: Too many Video Cards

I'm Logistics, and I approve of your post.