Sunday, December 25, 2005

How to make Radeon X1300 work with NForce4 chipset

EDIT2: The bug is still not discovered. Well, in both cases the nForce4-4X chipset is used. I found today 4 different classes of nForce4 drivers. I will try further investigating there. (well, both MSI and ASUS boards do this, do you think Sapphire VGA is the cause???)

EDIT: most probable cause was thie BIOS from 10/2005 which did not recognize the AMD processor from 11/2005 - well, there may be some other fine-tunings too. So new rules are: if the BIOS doesn't know your processor's name, you HAVE TO upgrade! (this used to be an option before)

Problem: Call of Duty causes total freezing of computer while playing or doing rapid moves.
Suspected cause: I suspect some buffer overrun. The HTT is 201MHz by default, PCIe 100MHz.

See my post to ATi:
I found a fix for the X1300Pro which freezed even under the today released Catalyst 5.13 drivers. The solution was simple. As the computers I install the X1300Pro run all Nforce4 chipsets, the HTT of the CPU is 201MHz... so I thougth if 100MHz PCIexpress is enough. After increasing it to 115MHz no longer any crashes! (ASUS K8N4-E) With MSI K8N Neo 3, where I met the problem first, I decreased maximum payload size to 128 (from 4096 default) and number of links from 16up and 16 down to 8+8. Again, Call of Duty was fixed.
Since the ASUS does not have these settings in the BIOS I had to find the "increase PCIe frequency" fix.

EPSON printout problems and solutions

I had problem with bronzing on glossy paper, found a solution on net: decrease CMY, increase saturation. Yes that helped a lot, but... the darkes colors became much lighter - so that hair color - intensity, decreased a lot... good for saving ink, while retaining clarity of the picture.
The EPSON printers work in CMYK by default, but selecting "vivid" instead of "Photorealistic" seemed to make prints in CMY only!!!
Well, problem was solved for 30 minutes... again only CMYK ;(
The problem with terrific bronzing is temporal only... it disappears completely after few days waiting! The black ink is different from the other a bit. (Stylus Color 685 with dye inks).
One other thing would help a lot, head heater, if the head had constant temp. of 35 deg. Celsius, printing would be much better.

EPSON printout problems and solutions

I had problem with bronzing on glossy paper, found a solution on net: decrease CMY, increase saturation. Yes that helped a lot, but... the darkes colors became much lighter - so that hair color - intensity, decreased a lot... good for saving ink, while retaining clarity of the picture.
The EPSON printers work in CMYK by default, but selecting "vivid" instead of "Photorealistic" seemed to make prints in CMY only!!!
Well, problem was solved for 30 minutes... again only CMYK ;(
The problem with terrific bronzing is temporal only... it disappears completely after few days waiting! The black ink is different from the other a bit. (Stylus Color 685 with dye inks).
One other thing would help a lot, head heater, if the head had constant temp. of 35 deg. Celsius, printing would be much better.