The Mother Board

Also, the fan doesn't work. First thing I checked. Connected, fan running, unfortunately not the issue. Today (thursday) is my day to talk to visiontek support again. Anyone had any experience with them?

Also, since the BIOS is now updated, should this thread be moved to the tech question forum, with a new title of AGP video card not functioning?

SMM

You can start a new thread in the tech support forum about your AGP card not working like it should or you can stay in this one and we'll take it from here.

Try to get information on what AGP standard this card is supporting and if they have had issues before with this card on older motherboards.

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System error, strike any user to continue...

On Thursday, I called Visiontek support about the video card not working. The guy who answered went through his checklist:
1. Power plugged into card? Yes
2. Followed directions on CD? Yes
3. Downloaded drivers from visiontek site? Yes
4. BIOS up to date? Yes
5. Device manager lists correct version of driver in effect? Yes
6. Next step, take the board to a working system and try it. I explained that I HAD a working system, the one we were talking about, and his board doesn't work in it.

Solution is that board is bad, contact warranty department.

I went to the warranty page on the web site. They wanted me to register, which I tried to do, but the last step in the process was the email they were supposed to send to me, which never arrived. I then went to the warranty page again, and entered the status, and that the tech people sent me over, could you please tell me what to do?

Today I got an email from the warranty staff, asking if I had tried installing the drivers without the board being installed in the system. I did my best to explain that it's tough to install video board drivers with no video board actually in the machine. They work M-F, so I'm interested in their response. I'll bet they ask me to take the board out, send it to them, and they will test it and send me an email with their findings. More as the story unfolds.

SMM

Asus is not going to warranty the board past the 1 year mark from date of purchase.

This is basically what your looking at: Either the system is more damaged then just a bad video card, or the new video card is not compatible (or not really tested and guaranteed to work).

What was the the old video card? Was it nVidia? I'd trade the Radeon in for an nVidia next and see if that works.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... 890&y=-112

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Hardware,

The new board is about 3 weeks old. The system works fine, even with the new board, just in VGA mode. The card is compatible -- AGP 8X -- but I don't know about tested and guaranteed to work.

Old card was NVidia, fan gave out, and video became shaky. I took it apart enough to determine the fan was the problem, which required me to take the heat sink off the old chip. I have the old Nvidia board, with bad fan, in a few pieces, and as I mentioned above, would need to clean off old thermal paste, re-paste, replace fan, and hope it worked. At this point, I'd rather get the Radeon card to work, because it is one piece, the fan works, and I just need it to last a few weeks.

Waiting for response from the warranty group at visiontek.

SMM

To be perfectly honest with you, I do not believe there is anything wrong with the card or the board themselves.. It appears to be a compatability issue between the card, the board and Windows 7.

Asus only lists upto Windows XP for downloads. And considering the last date availible is 2003, its all pre-HD era AFAIK.

The only way to enable HD video would be a settings change in the motherboard BIOS if avaailible. If the video card software offers it you might be able to make the adjustment there.

This motherboard is a plain P4S8X and not a P4S8X-X or other model??

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There are several sources for a new GPU fan.. including www.newegg.com/ , www.amazon.com/ , eBay, and www.directron.com .
But ensure the exact replacement is used, so you don't need to make extensive "mods" to the unit.
If your video is not up to great standards, perhaps the Device Manager is not accepting the true device chipset.. and using what it deems appropriate.
Ensure the old device is removed from the hardware lineup, and the drivers uninstalled. Some uninstalls require going to the driver folder, and manually deleting files. There may be a file called "unwise.exe" which could be the removal key.
There are issues with the AGP video card platform.. being considered "obsolete" in favor of the PCI-E platform. Might be worth a look at this Windows Forum link. Certain models are not compatible to the Windows WHQL standards. But other AGP models are still accepted. Main reason for incompatibility is that the drivers need to be redone for the latest OS platforms. The use of AGP video is on the wane.

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[quote=Toby B]To be perfectly honest with you, I do not believe there is anything wrong with the card or the board themselves.. It appears to be a compatability issue between the card, the board and Windows 7. [/quote]

This is exactly what I mean, which is why I would go with the nVidia card as a next step..

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Toby,

The Nvidia card that overheated, starting this whole fiasco, was a GeForce 7600GT. This is, I believe, quite a bit upscale from the visiontek/Radeon 3450 I'm trying to replace it with. Also, I'm not trying to get to HD, just to being able to view videos without dropouts. I have a cable modem ethernet connection, and the Nvidia board worked fine, so I don't think the problem is that the system or the network can't support the requirements, just that the Radeon board doesn't work. It could be that Radeon/visiontek hasn't updated drivers to Win 7, but it would be nice if they would just tell me that. Oh, and trying to play video from the PC directly still has dropouts -- missing audio, skipping video -- that weren't present with the Nvidia card.

Karlsweldt,

Checked on the fan. The sticker on it says it is a Magic MGA5012XR-O10. These are available, but everything I see says it will ship from China, and take up to 24 days to get here. Wish there was a US supply. They are inexpensive - $9 to $18 - but the time delay is aggravating. Interestingly enough, the fan on the visiontek board appears to be just about the same size, with screw connectors in just about the same spot. If I get real frustrated, I might take the fan off the visiontek and see if it works on the Nvidia. Still have the process of re-pasting the heatsink, and also making the bet that the overheat on the Nvidia card didn't fry it too much.

Also, I clobbered as much of the Nvidia driver world as I could identify. Device manager shows the new board ID, and lists the new driver version under the properties tab, but still flags the board as not working code (43).

To All,

Did get a response from visiontec warranty -- they want me to put the board into a different working system, which I don't have. Back in my days as a mainframe OS guru, when we had a problem, we'd tell the user to do a bunch of stuff that pretty much had almost nothing to do with the issue, either to get them to go away while we figured out the real problem, or get them to go away while we worked on something more critical, or get them to go away and hopefully be discouraged enough to cobble up some fix themselves. Same things happened with IBM, both the software and hardware fix people. Not pretty, but there you are. Sounds to me like the same thing is going on here -- if the tech support and/or warranty people can stall me long enough, I'll eventually go away because I'll either work something out myself, buy another card, or just toss it all in and make some educated guesses, order and build my new PC, and have the video problem go away. Guess the French were right -- plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - The more things change, the more they stay the same.

What is really interesting is that this is all over a $69 video card. We have $10,000 worth of technical effort from you guys, from visiontek tech support and warranty, and just sending me a replacement card would be cheaper, quicker, and more effective (even if the replacement card didn't work any better, because that's a solution, too) than all the rhetoric expended. Ugh.

SMM

Try uninstalling update KB982526 as it is reported to give an error 43 on your video card. I think this is the first time you actually wrote down the error code you're getting.

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System error, strike any user to continue...