Re: Video Cards, Advise and Going Wacky

[Charles Knox <cknox@netspace.net.au>]

At 04:53 AM 3/18/2002 -0000, you wrote:
>> Dave, what does "the rest of my custom system" consist of, with which the
>Matrox cards were incompatible?
>
>Sorry, I omitted to change to 'plain text'.
>
>It's an ASUS A7V 133 Motherboard, 900MHz Athlon (massive tower heatsink with
>2 cooling fans), BT Speedway ISDN internal modem, SMC EZ 1211TX 10/100
>Network card, LG DVD, Liteon CD-RW, 2 x Fujitsu HDDs at 8 and 20Gb, and 1 x
>IBM-DTLA HDD (40Gb, 7200RPM). No audio, and usually an Adaptec 2944 or 2940
>SCSI controller for whatever I'm currently writing a driver for - hence no
>SCSI disks, so that I can't prevent the OS from accessing its drive when I'm
>testing buggy code. The HDDS are in 5 inch carriers with external cooling
>fans fitted. The PSU is low-noise (approved for AMD CPUs), 350W.  768 Mb
>PC-133 SDRAM by a well-known brand which I forget (can't read them without
>shutting down and removing one). WinNT2000 with all SP and security fixes
>applied up to date. Oh, and the ATI AGP video which works fine at 1280 x
>1024 x 32bit :-)
>
>D.
>
>Dave Emmerson wrote:
>FWIW, I found dual-head Matrox cards to be totally incompatible with the
>rest of my custom system (no on-board video), repeatedly freezing it solid
>after an hour's use. I'd taken care to keep the area around the boards'
>cooling fans clear, and the inside of the case was cool. I eventually binned
>them in disgust and bought cheaper ATI cards which have been perfectly
>adequate. Your mileage may vary. D.
>--
>

To me, freezing after an hour's use suggests heat -- in an hour the card
should have repeated everything that might give it indigestion many times,
but some low-current components can take that long to get up to working
temperature.

Your spec suggests you have up to 4 PCI cards installed, so you might be
obstructing/diverting the airflow *just* enough to affect cooling.

With present-day motherboards, I never use PCI slot 1 if there's an AGP
card installed.

Rather than use it, I'd look for a motherboard with more slots...

Two reasons -- a card in slot 1 effectively blocks off the AGP fan, and the
AGP slot and PCI-1 are on the same bus (slot-1 is where you'd normally
stick a PCI video card in the absence of AGP), so that using it may well
upset the video -- and often does...

If slot 1 is empty, see if you can arrange a definite airflow across the
video card from outside (maybe an 80mm fan in the front of the case, if
there's no provision for one below the power supply at the rear) -- you may
well have an area where the airflow is pretty dead, and the AGP fan
recirculates the already warmed air.

This is why AMD now want power supplies to have a bottom air intake --
motherboards almost universally have the CPU directly beneath it, and
without something to keep it flowing the air just goes round and around in
the sheltered corner between the video card and the power supply.

You probably also find the system quite picky about where you put the SCSI
card?

Charles
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