Yep, I definately have the latest bios, from Oct 2001. I'm thinking it
might have something with the promise driver or ntfs. I've run fat32
until now.

Thanks for the tip though!


JRS wrote in
:

I had an older duallie Tyan with the Athlon MP CPU's. Also had issues
when write combining was on until a BIOS update came around from Tyan
that resolved it. Have you checked the Tyan site for a newer mobo
bios??





Interesting note: I was browsing the storage newsgroup and found out
that some Promise controllers have dma conflicts with some Nvidia
cards, and turning off write combining sometimes fixes it.

I wonder if this is related to updating the Promise driver to their
latest one for 2003.


"Mr. Grinch" wrote in
.223.159:

System details:
Dual Boot Windows ME / Server 2003
Nvidia drivers 44.03
MSI Ti42008x
Tyan Tiger 100 S1832DL dual P3-800 Motherboard, 1GB ram, SBlive
sound, Promise 133/TX ATA controller, Compaq Netelligent nic.

System has been stable in the past, far as I can tell, but the
problems started when I rebuilt the system with Server 2003 and
44.03 drivers.

2003 by default sets the video performance slider turned right
down. So I push it to full acceleration, and turn on write
combining. Then seemingly at random I get these screen crashes.
The system is still working, but the screen is total gibberish, as
if I'm using the wrong driver.

If I turn off write combining, everything works.

So it looks like I should either go back to 43.45 drivers or try
the 45.20 drivers. I've been trying to download them from Guru3D
but keep getting gateway timeouts.

Anyone have details on what write combining actually does and how
much performance impact, if any, it would make?


JRS
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