switching from agp to pci

Am rebuilding a p2/500 with an Abit-bf6 board with agp. It is a 4mg nvidia riva card and because I have a 64mb e-geforce2 I want to switch to the pci card.

Problem when I put the PCI card in the slot along with the AGP and the AGP is still the active card the system doesnt beep doesnt go anyway. Have gone into award bios and changed from agp to pci in fact have done many different settings but the system still wont boot with the pci card in the slot. As soon as I take the pci card out it starts right up.

I should be able to have both cards installed and then switch over to the pci card once the drivers have been installed and then remove the agp card. This is on a w2k system also.

The pci card is new right out of the box.

Anybody have any thoughts.

 

Sounds sensible to me

 

Actually that was the first thing I tried and when I turned the machine back on nothing happened no beeps no signal to the monitor nothing. Even tried 2 other PCI slots this board has 6 of them and made sure the video was the first in order of devices. Thats when I tried having both installed but with the pci card and agp card inserted the system wont boot. Remove the pci and it boots. Cant believe its a bad pci card cuz its right out of the box but I guess it could be bad but unlikely.

 

Look in your bios for a setting to disable the AGP. Mine has one where I can select PCI or AGP. Could be that when you remove the AGP card the bios is still expecting it to be there.

 

Actually have also done that. Award BIOS has "init agp or pci first ". No matter what I do it seems it only wants AGP.

Dont see anything to disable the agp just the init first variable.

 

Pete C

This board is a Abit-BF6 and unfortunately the client did not have the original manual. I tried looking at abit's site to see if the manual was available and I was unable to find it to see what the specs are. What I see in the bios pertaining to irq is they are set to auto and according to the description it says it will determine the correct irq setting for pci devices.

Heres another twist to this that I dont know if linked to problem I'm having. When I boot the machine up and it goes through the init. phase it tells me its a Celeron 500mhz but when I go into the BIOS and look at the SoftMenu 3 setup it tells me the CPU is operating at 233(66). I can change that but when I reset the jumpers on the board it defaults back to 233(66). So am a little confused about that.

The client that I brought this machine from was having some weird problems using 98 and the only way I got the machine to stable out was to install w2k. So I suppose its possible the board itself is in some way bad. On an old machine like this I can usually upgrade it a bit and sell it to one of my clients with kids and give them a decent 2nd machine and it dont cost them much. I only get my costs back and still it helps these people out with a decent 2nd machine.

I appreciate all your comments. Is a little strange. The reviews on this board are all pretty good so at one time it was a good board.

 

Pete C

This is an article I just came across on the softmenu and dip switches this board has. Being this is a new graphics card I am assuming that I should be able to put in the first pci slot with no problems. Am I reading it correctly or not ???


The first PCI slot and the AGP slot share IRQ signals so if you have devices in both slots, you should only install devices that support IRQ sharing. The same goes for PCI slots 2 and 5; and PCI slots 3 and 6.
PCI slot 4 shares IRQ signals with the USB controller. Unless you are not using the USB controller, you should only install PCI devices that support IRQ sharing in PCI slot 4.
The last PCI slot (slot 6) is a full bus slave. That means you can't install a bus mastering PCI card here. This is not unlike the situation with the last PCI slot (PCI slot 5) in the BE6-II, where that PCI slot is a bus-master capable slot but cannot support bus mastering PCI cards because it shares the bus master signal with the HPT366 controller.

 

Pete C

Actually it did. The setting that were on the machine were different in about 6 settings. I changed them to the what the link had and saved so will try the graphics card install again and see what happens. Also have an email into Abit but no idea how good their replies are.

Strange thing still is when I change the CPU setting to a 500(100) the system will not boot up and I have to reset the bios by the jumper and when I go back in it resets to 233(66) but still when it boots up the display says its a Celeron 500mhz. So something is still not kosher.
Dont you think the CPU setting in the bios should also read more like the 500mhz it says it should be ????

 

Pete C

Okay this is really getting strange as if it werent already. After resetting bios variable to the web site I uninstalled the agp drivers from within w2k shut system down and installed the pci card along with the agp no boot. Took agp card out and booted with just the pci card and after about 15secs the system started to sound like a police siren - have never heard that before. So tried the pci card in all the pci slots with the same police siren noise actually more like what the police have in England.

So what the heck is this machine trying to tell me cuz I am lost at this point ???????????????????????????????????????????

 

Okay so the cpu speed is probably correct even though it does give me options to choose from. The noise is like in England where its a squeel one at a time with a sec delay between each.

No I havent tried the pci card in another machine and that needs to be done to at least tell me if the pci card is bad to start with. I need to try it in a pci driven machine which in my part of the country is almost everyday I work on one. Just a soon not mess with my main machines on this.

So either the pci card is bad or the motherboard for whatever reason wants an agp card. Most likely a 2x -4x 32mb agp would work just fine. Guess I'll start looking for an inexpensive card. Guess I'll try OfficeMax and see if they have a 2 or 4x card. I have a good relationship with them so I can return it with no questions asked if it doesnt work.

Thanks for your assistance Pete and others. I wont bother you until I have tried in a different machine then I'll let you know.

Greg