Agent Orange
Veteran Member
Thanks for the link but I've seen all of that. I spent an entire evening with the problem. What I'm going to do is reload W7 at an absolute minimum and go from there.
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ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe
- Thread starter Agent Orange
- Start date
Thanks for the link but I've seen all of that. I spent an entire evening with the problem. What I'm going to do is reload W7 at an absolute minimum and go from there.
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
Windows 7 Install Update
Sorry for not updating sooner, but I've run into an inevitable hardware problem right smack in the the middle of this W7 venture. None of this affects the XP operation of the A7 however. The problem is with the Radeon HD 4650 (1 GB). The 4650 will not let W7 complete the install routine and throws a BSOD. The major problem is with the old ATI drivers, known back in the days to be buggy. There is a fix, but at this point, it's a 'Catch 22' situation. In order to install the correct drivers you first must get the system up and running. The alternative is to replace the 4650 with the GeForce 7600 (512 MB), which is what I did at my last attempt a week or so ago and was able to actually boot and run W7. However, the 7600 has taken a dump and no long is in working order (don't know and don't care). So, I have a somewhat lesser, performance-wise, 6200 (512 MB) on the way and should be here next week. What I do know is when I slipped the 4650 in after installing W7 with the 7600, I was at least able to boot in the safe mode, and it appears that as soon as W7 detects the 4650 it wants to install 4670 drivers by default. I see a challenge ahead on this. BTW, while looking for another AGP 8x video card it seem that the prices have skyrocketed. I have a small box full of 1x and 2x AGP's but none will come up on my A7 board, which leaves me wondering if anyone out there has had any success with something less than 8x.
Sorry for not updating sooner, but I've run into an inevitable hardware problem right smack in the the middle of this W7 venture. None of this affects the XP operation of the A7 however. The problem is with the Radeon HD 4650 (1 GB). The 4650 will not let W7 complete the install routine and throws a BSOD. The major problem is with the old ATI drivers, known back in the days to be buggy. There is a fix, but at this point, it's a 'Catch 22' situation. In order to install the correct drivers you first must get the system up and running. The alternative is to replace the 4650 with the GeForce 7600 (512 MB), which is what I did at my last attempt a week or so ago and was able to actually boot and run W7. However, the 7600 has taken a dump and no long is in working order (don't know and don't care). So, I have a somewhat lesser, performance-wise, 6200 (512 MB) on the way and should be here next week. What I do know is when I slipped the 4650 in after installing W7 with the 7600, I was at least able to boot in the safe mode, and it appears that as soon as W7 detects the 4650 it wants to install 4670 drivers by default. I see a challenge ahead on this. BTW, while looking for another AGP 8x video card it seem that the prices have skyrocketed. I have a small box full of 1x and 2x AGP's but none will come up on my A7 board, which leaves me wondering if anyone out there has had any success with something less than 8x.
GiGaBiTe
Veteran Member
Like I discussed long ago, the problems you're having with that 4650 are because of the weird setup of the card itself, not the drivers. The AGP version of the 4650/70 uses a bridge chip and requires special drivers provided by the card manufacturer itself, ATI/AMD never supported such a configuration with the 46x0 GPU. I have a regular HD4650 PCIe card and have never had issues with it in either Windows XP or 7 over a range of driver versions.
I definitely know you aren't getting AGP 1x/2x cards installed in your motherboard because they won't fit in the slot. AGP 1x/2x is keyed differently from AGP 4x/8x. There are universal key cards with notches to work in both slot types, so those can technically work. If you have universal AGP cards that aren't working, try cleaning the edge connector on the card. I was playing with some of my old AGP cards the last couple of days and several of them didn't work at all until I cleaned the connectors with deoxit gold. One of them was so bad I had to resort to a pencil eraser.
I definitely sympathize with you on the astronomical cost of AGP cards these days. The world has gotten vintage computer fever thanks to various Youtubers and drove costs of old gear way up. I'm glad that I kept most of my old gear over the years because I definitely wouldn't be able to afford it today.
I definitely know you aren't getting AGP 1x/2x cards installed in your motherboard because they won't fit in the slot. AGP 1x/2x is keyed differently from AGP 4x/8x. There are universal key cards with notches to work in both slot types, so those can technically work. If you have universal AGP cards that aren't working, try cleaning the edge connector on the card. I was playing with some of my old AGP cards the last couple of days and several of them didn't work at all until I cleaned the connectors with deoxit gold. One of them was so bad I had to resort to a pencil eraser.
I definitely sympathize with you on the astronomical cost of AGP cards these days. The world has gotten vintage computer fever thanks to various Youtubers and drove costs of old gear way up. I'm glad that I kept most of my old gear over the years because I definitely wouldn't be able to afford it today.
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
I know the 1x & 2x won't fit and was probably thinking 4x all along. The HD 4650 8x works fine with XP. I have the 4650 hot fix driver for Vista/W7: "11-1_agp-hotfix_vista_win7_32_dd_ccc.exe". The question is how to get it to load.
I'm going to head back over to the Sapphire website when I get some time, as they do have a small archive, and see if they have anything that will help. After all, they did have the XP fix. Others have had success running that card with W7 but I'm not sure about it on the A7. I think there's got to be a way.
GiGaBiTe
Veteran Member
I'm wondering if the crashing is because the drivers are using SSE2 or something that the Athlon XP doesn't have. If you had a socket 478 board with a Pentium 4 that had SSE2 and SSE3 (Prescott), it'd be interesting to see if the HD4650 worked on it.
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
W7 will load on the A7 and runs fairly well so far. The problem with my project seems to be the few bugs tied to the HD 4650 AGP 1 GB, as the Nvidia 7600 GS has no problems whatsoever. Yeah, a 478 would be a nice experiment, but I've got too many irons in the fire now what with this and the new Crosshair VI Hero that still needs a valid W7 OS to get up and running. (does run real nice on a borrowed W10 however)
Agent Orange
Veteran Member
It's time to put the A7 project to bed after almost 5 years. We've been through XP and touched on W7 and had a lot of fun resurrecting a lot of the old time games from the XP era. I would like to thank each and everyone who contributed to this thread. My A7 is still up and running and I have no plans to tear it down. I have several other projects going at this time and I'm assembling parts for a slightly new XP gamer featuring an Intel I5-750 and a Gigabyte motherboard from around late 2008/early 2009. This project will have more to do with actual games and less with hotrodding the hardware.