6800LE driver woes :(

[Paul Adams]

System:
AMD64 3400+
1Gb PC3200 TwinMOS (2x512Mb)
Windows XP Pro SP2 w/hotfixes
nVidia 6800LE 128Mb AGP (PixelView)
Seagate 250Gb SATA

The system is an HP Pavilion t760.se, which has very little in the way of BIOS tweaks available - AGP aperture size is 64Mb, no fastwrites or sideband addressing, supports 8x AGP.
Mainboard is based on the ASUSTek "Salmon" v1.03, according to CPU-Z the chipset is SiS760 rev.2, with southbridge SiS964.
BIOS is (Phoenix) v3.04 - 10-29-2004


The problem I have is getting a set of video drivers which will run through the 3DMark05 test without artifcating (or virtually 100% black screens), and to get World of Warcraft to play without artifacting (and lots of missing graphics on the login screen).

Drivers I have tried:
ForceWare 67.22 (leaked on Guru3D)
ForceWare 67.03 (official beta which is supposed to be good for SiS chipsets)
ForceWare 66.93 (latest official download)
ForceWare 66.70
Omega 1.6177 (ForceWare 61.77 based)

The Omega drivers I managed to use to play WoW for a while before noticing some artifacting - though the 3DMark05 score was dire (~1800).

Currently I have the 66.70's installed - 3DMark05 result is still crappy (but this does not bother me too much as I go off real world experience), there is some extreme artifacting in the first test but the remainder are okay.
WoW I managed to play for hours before I saw any artifacting, but it's bugging me now.

It seems the older (ForceWare) drivers give a more usable display but poorer performance if you believe 3DMark05, with the later versions having huge amounts of graphics simply "missing" but high framerates (I guess painting black screens is quick ) - the later versions give around 8500 in 3DMark05.

Everything is stock, I don't overclock.
Nothing is overheating, artifacting is present (to different degrees) after a boot from cold - even the "loading..." screens in 3DMark05 get corrupted with most drivers.


Duff card?
Unhappy chipset/AGP driver/ForceWare combination?
Lack of stable power from PSU? (No clue what it is, it's the stock HP one.)

I could try the card in my SS51G but as it only has a 200W PSU it might not have enough juice to drive it.

Right now nVidia are not my favourite card manufacturer.

[Agent]

Quite a few cards have had this / close issues (Check out the Gainward forums : LE users have been going crazy over there since launch, myself included over faulty cards).
Some seem to have memory issues, others seem to have bad pipelines (although this is the less common one).
This is going to sound stupid, but try UNDERclocking your card and see if the issue goes away. This "fixed" the gainward cards while people got another one and returned their LE's. If that doesnt work, you could try closing piplines off with rivatuner, but thats going a bit extreme.

I may be wrong here, but ive had quite a few issues myself with LE cards, and everyone of the buggers has been a hardware problem, not software, so im gussing you may be having similar issues.

[Feck]

Did you get this card with the system? If not power 'may' be a issue, try a different power supply (power consumption comparison here http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vid...-power_10.html). The drivers I use are Xtreme G 71.20b NV4x Beta Forceware Driver ( http://www.3dchipset.com/drivers/nvi.../nt5/7120b.php ), no probs with them (avoid 71.24 driver, turns the water yellow in HL2). You could try the card in the shuttle or in another system. I would also change the AGP aperture size to at least 128MB.

[Paul Adams]

This is going to sound stupid, but try UNDERclocking your card and see if the issue goes away. This "fixed" the gainward cards while people got another one and returned their LE's. If that doesnt work, you could try closing piplines off with rivatuner, but thats going a bit extreme.

Got RivaTuner and tried ramping down the core clock to 275MHz with no difference - not sure if this means anything but any memory clock setting deviating from the standard 700MHz made RivaTuner fail its test?

Tried enabling the "motherboard compatibility" option, forcing 4x AGP, forcing sideband addressing & fastwrites to OFF in nVstrap (though this doesn't carry through to the rest of the UI options?) - all with no joy.

Did you get this card with the system? If not power 'may' be a issue, try a different power supply (power consumption comparison here http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/vi...v-power_10.html).

Nope, the system came with an FX5500, but when I tried to play WoW it was jerking like made when I ran outside, of all things disabling the hardware mouse support fixes this but makes the cursor really crappy (lots of complaints on the WoW support forum on this).
I'll have a shufty at what the PSU rating is, but the different driver versions give wildly different performances and artifacting I'm not convinced it is power.

The drivers I use are Xtreme G 71.20b NV4x Beta Forceware Driver ( http://www.3dchipset.com/drivers/nv...g/nt5/7120b.php ), no probs with them (avoid 71.24 driver, turns the water yellow in HL2). You could try the card in the shuttle or in another system. I would also change the AGP aperture size to at least 128MB.

I might try putting the card into the Shuttle, but I don't expect it to even power on - also I can't alter the AGP aperture size in the BIOS, there are VERY few option (eww!) so that is stuck at 64Mb.


I rebuilt the system last night again, XP SP2 back from scratch, default PixelView drivers from the CD that came with the card (ForceWare 66.81) with the same result.

This is the kind of hassle I was expecting when I got my first Radeon 9800 Pro after reading all the horror stories, and that card has been perfectly fine, even with only a 250W PSU powering it in my SN41G2 system

I might try the 9800 Pro in here as test too actually...

[Paul Adams]

Update:

Pavilion PC has just a 250W PSU (this surprised me), I tried unplugging the 2 DVD drives and removing a pointless WLAN card, but it made no difference.

Tried 6800LE with:
ForceWare 66.81 (default from PixelView CD)
Omega 1.6177 (ForceWare 61.77) - 3DMark05 score of 1833
ForceWare 67.03 (SiS-friendly driver from nVidia) - 3DMark05 score of 8563

All tests had artifacting in the first 3DMark05 test and most had serious issues in the second test (third test always seemed to be routinely okay).


I put the stock FX5500 back in and tested 3DMark05:
ForceWare 66.81 - abandoned test before end, subtle shadow artifacting
ForceWare 67.03 - score of 279, still tiny niggly shadow issues visible

(The shadow issues might not be visible to most people unless they had sat and watched the 3DMark05 test over and over and over, but I spotted it straight away.)


Then I put the Radeon 9800 Pro from my Shuttle SN41G2 machine (which has a 250W PSU) and used the stock XP drivers which were installed by Windows as soon as it detected it:
3DMark05 score of 2260

Downloaded & installed Catalyst 4.12 drivers (getting a program error from the Catalyst control panel but I guess it's because I haven't cleaned up the drivers at all):
3DMark05 score of 2430

Both tests for the Radeon 9800 Pro card absolutely flawless in 3DMark05.

Zero WoW artifacting with the FX5500 or Radeon 9800 Pro (but damn, when it worked that 6800LE card had a NICE picture).


This 6800LE pile of pants is going straight back, and that's my experimenting with nVidia for a LONG time.

[ToxIC tEChy]

i have a gainward 6800 le it came with moded drivers
i o\c it by coolbits to 350mhz and 900mhz
i have 12pp and 6vp thanks to riva tuner and coolbits
i have no problem at all execpt the core has 16pp and 4 were damaged
Toxic techy

My new rig:
a 160gb maxtor and a 40gb segate hdd
1gb ddr 2700
abit 3rd eye k8pro socket 754
graphics see above
nec 3500a dual layer dvd burner
amd 64 Winchester 3200+ o\c to 3800+
nzxt gaurdian 3case fans and a 12cm fan mounted in the cd drive slots!!!!!!
450w qtec psu dual fan gold edition
compaq 16x dvd drive

[Paul Adams]

I think it's some issue with nVidia cards and (some?) SiS chipsets - they have a known problem with the 6600GT and these chipsets apparently (they recommend 67.03 ForceWare to get round this).

I tried every which way to get it to work, with no joy.

Now ordered a Radeon X800 Pro and a 425W silent PSU from Komplett (.se) as this FX5500 also has a bit of artifacting (but nowhere near as often as the 6800LE).

Maybe I'll look at nVidia again when I get round to buying a PCI-E mobo...

[Paul Adams]

Ooooh, this is NICE

Powercolor X800 Pro with 256Mb DDD3 is goooood!

I got some special edition which came with Hitman Contracts, CS:CZ, PowerDVD suite and a backpack (?!).

3DMark05 ran smoothly for the first time ever, no glitches or bugged shadows, decent framerate, very nice picture, all tests perfect.
*happy*

System is a little bit noisier now with this card (virtually silent case and PSU fans) but that's unavoidable - my Shuttle got a whole lot noisier with the Radeon 9800 Pro in it too.

Now I just need my 32" LCD TV to turn up to test the DVI output