NVidia freeze fix found

[BeWary]

Hey all. I don't know if this has been a problem for anyone here, but I thought I'd share this none-the-less. I recently upgraded the video card in one of my computers to a GeForce 2 MX. This is on an older P2-400 with a 440BX chipset. The computer was consistently locking up in Direct3D games under Win9x, and after MUCH work trying to solve the problem, I found the solution tucked away in a corner of the Net.

The trick is to lower the power consumption of the card slightly (from my understanding). This can be done by setting the AGP Aperture size (through the CMOS) to 16MB (which is supposed to disable the AGP bus from using system memory). The alternative fix (I've tried this too), is to merge a line into your registry that forces the card into AGP 1X mode. According to the guy that wrote up the fixes, the registry fix only decreased performance in games to 2-3%, whereas lowering the AGP Aperture size saw a >12% performance hit in some cases. Both fixes work for me, though I'm currently using the registry fix only.

Here's the REG file (copy this into a new file, call it forceAGP1x.reg, and then right-click on it and MERGE it into your registry):

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\System]

"ReqAGPRate"=dword:00000001

E-mail me at bwharry@ieee.org if you need further assistance.

BeWary

P.S. One other possible solution was to slightly increase the I/O voltage for the motherboard. I was not able to try this, and I wouldn't recommend it as it might possibly damage your video card (from what I've read anyway).

[WWB]

Hehe. I have a similar mobo in terms of chipset (Asus 440BX rev1) and I just have never been able to get it to run with an AGP apeture over 16mb. I just blamed it on incessant overclocking.

WWB