Help with Intel 845E chipset mobo and Geforce3 card, please!

[ELiTe]

Hi guys,

I hope you can help, been searching for an answer for a couple of days... :(

I recently got a P4 1.7Ghz, and whenever D3D or OpenGL kicks in, the game/apps will CTD between 2 to 20 minutes.

This kinda makes game playing rather frustrating... it's worse than a VIA board without 4in1 drivers installed! Please note that I don't overclock in general, and specifically in this case I have even tried UNDERclocking!

My system specs:
--------------------
Intel P4 1.7Ghz (400mhz FSB)
Gigabyte GA-8IE (Intel 845E chipset, mobo can do 400/533 FSB)
Intel Chipset Software Utility (4.0.1013)
Intel Application Accelerator (2.22)
512MB PC2100 DDR RAM (266mhz speed)
SB Live! Value (Currently removed)
AC97 Audio (Realtek ALC650, with drivers v2.94 from Gigabyte's site)
Windows Millenium with the latest patches I can find on Microsoft's site
DirectX 8.1b
GeForce3 Ti 200 (ELSA DV721 TV-Out)
nVidia reference drivers 30.82 (currently)
450W Power Supply


I have tried:

1) Clean install of WinME
2) Using the latest nVidia reference drivers (30.82) as well as 28.32
3) Removing the SBLive card, and using the onboard AC97 audio
4) Underclock my CPU by changing the CPU HOST CLOCK in the BIOS from 17x to 15x
5) Ensuring my GeForce card is on an IRQ by itself (it is - IRQ 11).

The only thing I haven't done, is to reduce my RAM speed from 266 to 200mhz. Should it have been done? I was thinking that since the FSB is in multiples of 100's and not 133's should I have just reduced my DDR RAM speed?

This particular motherboard has NO OPTIONS WHATSOEVER in the BIOS for me to adjust AGP settings. No Aperture, no Sidebanding, no Fastwrites, no Driving Control, not even Vcore Voltage settings for the CPU... I can't mess with those as I did on my old AMD system to stabilize my system :( Also, this particular mobo *ONLY* accepts 4x AGP cards (1.5v), and I guess that's why there's no BIOS options at all to set the AGP.

HELP!!! ANY suggestions is very, VERY MUCH appreciated!

[Grinnin Reaper]

If you can I'ld ditch ME and go back to 98. Second When your installing drivers do you do the chipset First. Other drivers will install first but without the chipset first they won't be right. You may have allready did this but just throwing it out there. I'm not sure about the memory speed. Athlons won't boot if you change the Front Side Bus Speed but that's about the limit of my knowledge on that. Try running some benchmarks like pcmark 2002 from www.madonion.com and see what is insaneley slow. Hope that helps.

[BobyJo]

Any time you have a problem of kicking out and going back to desktop, is driver related. You need to start over on installing all the drivers for the mobo, and vid card. Video card drivers have the most to deal with this problem. Download the latest drivers for the nVidia card. I believe the latest is 40.xx something. They have made great advancements of Open GL and D3D. If you are using powerstrip or some other software to advance the performance of the vid card. Be sure you don't have some of the features disabled that are needed for OGL and D3D. The last item to check, Do you have more than one stick of memory? If you do remove one of them. Check and see if the problem stays, if not that stick of memory is bad. If you check and the problems are still there. Remeove the other stick of memory and install the first one you removed. If this don't resolve anything at least you know it is not memory related. Never is it necessary to operate any component below default speeds. If that compent refuses to run properly at default speed, RMA and get a new one.

[ELiTe]

Hi everyone...

Thanks so much for posting your suggestions. I'd like to say a very big THANK YOU to Babyjo. You nailed it! It was indeed my 2nd stick of DDR that went bad....

It just didn't strike me that my RAM would be bad because the symptoms were similar to when I first got my VIA and AMD set... I thought Intel had the same problems with AGP cards too...

Thanks once again! You guys really rock!

[BobyJo]

You are welcome. Any time I can help, just ask.