Because of the way the some ATi Radeons works (including your 9800 pro)
turning on fast-writes via SmartGart firstly gives no performance benefit,
but does detract from the overall system stability. If you still want to
update the motherboard drivers though, I'd suggest you visit:
http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp and select Platform.nForce
drivers and Unified.

CrimsonLiar

"Mark Epps" wrote in message
...
Sorry if this is OT for this newsgroup - i have visited the ati newsgroup,
and the general theme
seems to point towards the maotherboard chipset drivers....

Had to recently re-install windows XP (Home).

I have a radeon 9800 Pro graphics card, but now notice that smartgart is
always off
(it was always set to 8x before the re-install),
and I can't set AGP to on let alone to 8x

When I try to install nvidia chipset drivers from the gigabyte website,
Windows XP locks up on boot-up.

any ideas?

TIA

Mark