First off, to get the obligatory brown-nosing out of the way, I love the site, and I've been lurking for a good year and a half or more. I really have learned an incredible amount of information about 3D technology just from listening to the people who post here - it's amazing! Of course, there's an unusually large amount of fanboyism too 
, but that's only to be expected. ^_^
Anyway, I've been working on this for two days straight (on two hours of sleep no less) and I've not seen any resolution forthcoming. I know you peeps are infinitely more knowledgeable than I am, and after a few hours of fruitless searching on other forums and IRC, I decided to see if any of you might know what's happened.
I traded a friend of mine a Radeon 7500 for his aging Geforce 2 Pro. Now, I know that wasn't a very good trade, but he needed it (since his hard lacked DVI), and besides, I owed him $40. In any event, I had this Leadtek Geforce 2 Pro (32MB) card sitting here in this box in front of me. I get it all installed (29.42, WXPP), and it's working fine. So, I decide to play with it a bit in Powerstrip. I checked the clocks and they were at 200/400 - good, moving on...and when I checked the AGP settings, I noted that fast writes and sideband addressing were both disabled, and I couldn't enable them. I google-d about for awhile, and discovered that Leadtek (for whatever braindead reason) disables both of these in their BIOSes. Well, this is where I got stupid. >_< Instead of being content with the new, artifact-free 220/465 Mhz card in front of me, I decide to enable SBA and FW by flashing a new BIOS.
I grabbed Ray Adams' VGA BIOS editor and loaded my card's BIOS from ROM, then simply unchecked the two checkboxes that say "Disable SBA" and "Disable FW". Saved that BIOS, then rebooted into DOS to flash it (but not before saving a dump of my original BIOS just in case. I'm not that dumb. ^_^) I boot to my W98 boot disk, and used NVFLASH 4.16 to flash the modified BIOS. Everything goes fine, and then I reboot.
Nothing. The light on my monitor turns orange and stays that way. The computer boots fine - it seems completely unperturbed, and boots right on up into Windows. Pfeh.
So, I shut it down (the right way - thank heavens for keyboard shortcuts) and popped my case, enabling the 4MB PCI Rage XL card on my motherboard, then pulling out the AGP card so I can go into the CMOS setup and set "Init VGA First" to PCI. I saved that, shut it down, put the AGP card back in, and then cut it back on, booting into DOS. I'll just flash the original BIOS back in and leave it alone, I figured. I was already messing with things I shouldn't have been anyway.
So, I change the monitor cable over again, and disable the onboard video, then, when I go to boot, I get the same blank-screen-but-still-booting behavior I got before. With the original video BIOS.
That was two nights ago. Since then, I've downloaded both an nVidia reference Geforce 2 Pro BIOS, as well as a BIOS that's supposedly from my exact card, the Leadtek Winfast Geforce 2 Pro 32MB w/Chrontel TV-out chip. In the process, I managed to find an actual Leadtek Winfast BIOS flash program. So, out of curiosity, I decided to see if IT would let me flash the BIOS that I edited. No, it errors halfway through, saying that it can't verify the BIOS, giving me a message that it was corrupt (or similar). Hmm. So, I tried to flash the original BIOS using that program. Same error. How about the Nvidia reference BIOS? Same exact error.
...
So, how about the Leadtek Winfast BIOS? Worked fine. I breathed a sigh of relief, changed over the monitor cable, disabled the onboard VGA, and restarted. It booted into Windows fine, and installed the driver again (naturally), and so I decided to check Powerstrip to make sure all was well.
200/333. My card had become a GTS. Peculiar...but not unfixable. I went ahead and overclocked it to the original default of 200/400. It seemed to work, so I ran Artifact Tester, which said that I was getting craploads of artifacting. I didn't notice any, though, so I tried to run 3DMark. Instant BSOD/STOP error. Pfeh. And I still didn't have FW or SBA enabled. >_<
I'll spare you everything I went through at that point (it even gives artifacts at 200/333 now, according to Artifact Tester), but eventually I got another BIOS to flash properly, the Nvidia reference BIOS. Once I had it flashed, I went ahead and formatted the drive and reinstalled XP, the same way I always do. It boots fine now, and works perfectly (the TV-out even works!)...at 200/333. Somehow, my card has stopped working at 200/400, which was the original clock speed! I'm starting to think Leadtek is selling overclocked GTSes as Pros, or something. But it DOES have 5ns DDR - it says it right on the RAM chips (-5).
So, for those of you sweet-hearted enough to have read through all of this gibberish - what could have happened? How could my RAM suddenly stop working at it's rated 400Mhz simply because of a BIOS flash - unless it changed memory timings (the only explanation I could come up with). In any event, the card runs considerably slower than my Radeon 7500 did, when every review I can find online says the GF2 Pro and the R7500 are very similar in performance. Perhaps because it's a GTS (without SBA or FW, even) now? At least it runs in 4X mode. Still, I've half a mind to go buy myself a cheap GF3 or 8500 or maybe splurge and get a Parhelia in a few weeks.
Any ideas?
, but that's only to be expected. ^_^Anyway, I've been working on this for two days straight (on two hours of sleep no less) and I've not seen any resolution forthcoming. I know you peeps are infinitely more knowledgeable than I am, and after a few hours of fruitless searching on other forums and IRC, I decided to see if any of you might know what's happened.
I traded a friend of mine a Radeon 7500 for his aging Geforce 2 Pro. Now, I know that wasn't a very good trade, but he needed it (since his hard lacked DVI), and besides, I owed him $40.
In any event, I had this Leadtek Geforce 2 Pro (32MB) card sitting here in this box in front of me. I get it all installed (29.42, WXPP), and it's working fine. So, I decide to play with it a bit in Powerstrip. I checked the clocks and they were at 200/400 - good, moving on...and when I checked the AGP settings, I noted that fast writes and sideband addressing were both disabled, and I couldn't enable them. I google-d about for awhile, and discovered that Leadtek (for whatever braindead reason) disables both of these in their BIOSes. Well, this is where I got stupid. >_< Instead of being content with the new, artifact-free 220/465 Mhz card in front of me, I decide to enable SBA and FW by flashing a new BIOS.I grabbed Ray Adams' VGA BIOS editor and loaded my card's BIOS from ROM, then simply unchecked the two checkboxes that say "Disable SBA" and "Disable FW". Saved that BIOS, then rebooted into DOS to flash it (but not before saving a dump of my original BIOS just in case. I'm not that dumb. ^_^) I boot to my W98 boot disk, and used NVFLASH 4.16 to flash the modified BIOS. Everything goes fine, and then I reboot.
Nothing. The light on my monitor turns orange and stays that way. The computer boots fine - it seems completely unperturbed, and boots right on up into Windows. Pfeh.
So, I shut it down (the right way - thank heavens for keyboard shortcuts) and popped my case, enabling the 4MB PCI Rage XL card on my motherboard, then pulling out the AGP card so I can go into the CMOS setup and set "Init VGA First" to PCI. I saved that, shut it down, put the AGP card back in, and then cut it back on, booting into DOS. I'll just flash the original BIOS back in and leave it alone, I figured. I was already messing with things I shouldn't have been anyway.
So, I change the monitor cable over again, and disable the onboard video, then, when I go to boot, I get the same blank-screen-but-still-booting behavior I got before. With the original video BIOS.
That was two nights ago. Since then, I've downloaded both an nVidia reference Geforce 2 Pro BIOS, as well as a BIOS that's supposedly from my exact card, the Leadtek Winfast Geforce 2 Pro 32MB w/Chrontel TV-out chip. In the process, I managed to find an actual Leadtek Winfast BIOS flash program. So, out of curiosity, I decided to see if IT would let me flash the BIOS that I edited. No, it errors halfway through, saying that it can't verify the BIOS, giving me a message that it was corrupt (or similar). Hmm. So, I tried to flash the original BIOS using that program. Same error. How about the Nvidia reference BIOS? Same exact error.
...
So, how about the Leadtek Winfast BIOS? Worked fine. I breathed a sigh of relief, changed over the monitor cable, disabled the onboard VGA, and restarted. It booted into Windows fine, and installed the driver again (naturally), and so I decided to check Powerstrip to make sure all was well.
200/333. My card had become a GTS. Peculiar...but not unfixable. I went ahead and overclocked it to the original default of 200/400. It seemed to work, so I ran Artifact Tester, which said that I was getting craploads of artifacting. I didn't notice any, though, so I tried to run 3DMark. Instant BSOD/STOP error. Pfeh. And I still didn't have FW or SBA enabled. >_<
I'll spare you everything I went through at that point (it even gives artifacts at 200/333 now, according to Artifact Tester), but eventually I got another BIOS to flash properly, the Nvidia reference BIOS. Once I had it flashed, I went ahead and formatted the drive and reinstalled XP, the same way I always do. It boots fine now, and works perfectly (the TV-out even works!)...at 200/333. Somehow, my card has stopped working at 200/400, which was the original clock speed! I'm starting to think Leadtek is selling overclocked GTSes as Pros, or something. But it DOES have 5ns DDR - it says it right on the RAM chips (-5).
So, for those of you sweet-hearted enough to have read through all of this gibberish - what could have happened? How could my RAM suddenly stop working at it's rated 400Mhz simply because of a BIOS flash - unless it changed memory timings (the only explanation I could come up with). In any event, the card runs considerably slower than my Radeon 7500 did, when every review I can find online says the GF2 Pro and the R7500 are very similar in performance. Perhaps because it's a GTS (without SBA or FW, even) now?
At least it runs in 4X mode. Still, I've half a mind to go buy myself a cheap GF3 or 8500 or maybe splurge and get a Parhelia in a few weeks.Any ideas?
