A little technical help, by any chance?

You people are smarter than I'll ever be when it comes to hardware. Perhaps someone would like to give good ol' Muro a hand with a certain issue?

Most of everything I have in my computer is about 8 years old. For two years I've been forced to use Nvidia Riva TNT M64 as my graphic card, because my old GeForce 4 MX died out on me after years of loyal duty. I don't have enough cash to buy a completely new computer just yet, but I wanted to buy a new graphic card to once again enjoy those of my games which need a card strong enough to support their 3D graphics (we're talking GTA: San Andreas and older here, to be exact).

Turned out it is quite a mission, because my motherboard is only compatible with cards using AGP up to x4, while the only cards still being produced are either PCI-E or AGP x8, from what I observed. Couldn't find any AGP x4 card, but I found and bought GeForce FX 5500, which was said to be a AGP x8 card compatible with AGP x4 motherboards.

Here what happens when I try to use it. After putting it in the motherboard and running the system, everything is 1024x768 32 bit, as usual. However after installing the card's drivers the only available resolutions are 640x480 and 800x600, while the the only available color depth - a whooping 4 bit, aka 16 outstanding colors and no refreshing rate other than the default low one.

Does this mean that the card is incompatible with my motherboard after all? Before installing the drivers it did display 1024 x 768 32 bit, so it's not like the card can't do it. After sitting over two hours with this crap installing, uninstalling, installing once again and so on, googling things up and all in all eventually achieving nothing, I'm feeling rather frustrated and frankly I'm quite out of ideas what to do, other than return the card to the shop and try to find an even older one. Is all hope lost for this motherboard + graphic card configuration?

If this information is of any use, my motherboard is KT3 Ultra2-C.

 

Well, you could you could try changing the AGP setting in your motherboard - AGP 1x through 4x all use the same signaling voltage of 1.5V (compared to AGP 8x which is 0.8 IIRC). Try downscaling to 2x or something, it'll be slower but by the sounds of it it'll hardly be a bottleneck.

Otherwise, it could be because of nvidia's crap legacy card support. Windows drivers are getting pretty good these days, so if you get 3D acceleration with their drivers (uninstall the nvidia ones) at 1024x768x32 then I wouldn't worry about it. You can test this by loading up a game that requires 3D (San Andreas for example).

Otherwise, you most likely need to try older nvidia drivers though how old will depend on your version of windows (what are you using, btw?)

Could also be your motherboard/powerpack. Old powerpacks tend to 'surge' on the rails, that pulsing can very quickly fuck your hardware and esp. your motherboard over.

 

I'd save up and buy a new system.

 

I eventually plan to do it, but that requires savings more that ten times bigger than the ones I planned to use up for the recent graphic card. It will take quite some time before I'll gather such funds and I wanted to not be limited to 2D games until that day comes.

That wouldn't do, sadly. One thing was the impossible to change default refreshing rate, both too slow and painful for the eyes for working with it more than was absolutely necessary, the other one being the fact that apparently all games refused to work without the drivers, Doom 95 included. That is the situation in my Windows XP Professional, not sure how good are the default drivers of newer versions of Windows.

It was a suggestion given by thee independent sources, you being one of them. I gave it a try and eventually found some drivers which are about five years older than the most actual ones and holy be damned, would you believe it, they actually work!

I'm quite surprised, really. I thought that when it comes to software such as drivers, newer ones - being the more perfect and more updated ones - are always the best option, assuming that older drivers should be compatible with older hardware and software, while newer drivers - newer AND older. After seeing that both drivers from an attached CD (recent enough to have drivers for Windows 7) and the newest ones from nvidia.com didn't work, I would have never thought that I should look for older ones, thinking that "older" only equals "inferior" in this case. Seems I was wrong. A lesson learned, I guess.

Thanks for your suggestions, Charonte, I really appreciate your help.

 

Yeah, eventually they drop support for older cards as the firmware changes and to reduce bloat but even so it'd be nice if, when you selected your card on the nvidia site, it linked you to a driver that actually worked.


No worries though, enjoy the new card - ironically it's probably twice as fast as anything you've had previously :thumbup: