Hey guys, just wanted to share something and get your opinions about this.

Ok, I decided to revive my old PC that just went XX a few months ago. I figured out that it was the RAM and video card that were not working anymore so I bought them replacements. It's a very old system, an MSI P4mam2-v mobo, 512mb of ddr 400 RAM and a Geforce FX5500 from inno3d (i know this isn't a good card but it's the only thing available and it's the cheapest AGP here). It's not for gaming but for everyday use.

Installing the drivers for the card was really a pain in the ***. I had to do 3 clean installs to figure out what the problem was. The first time, system ran properly but after a few minutes, the screen would just go black and return to its original state. So i thought it was a sign of overheating. I touched the card but it wasn't hot at all. The drivers I used were from the CD that was included, old drivers though. So I downloaded the drivers off Nvidia's website, latest as they say. Installed those, and still no luck. Screen would just go blank.

The card would run perfectly without any drivers but can't play games.



Reinstalled windows once again and tried first installing the AGP.inf driver for the motherboard. Installed the card and drivers (latest), but still the same thing happened. Uninstalled again the new drivers and installed the drivers from the CD. No luck at all. Screen would just go blank.

Third time, I reinstalled windows (had fun installing windows though), and I did not install the drivers from the CD directly (running setup.exe or something). But what I did was, I went to device manager and just updated the drivers from there, just installing the driver from device manager did the job. The card would boot to windows without problems but would show a blank screen whenever I would run a game (counter-strike 1.6). Then I thought of reducing the AGP speed to 2x, which was set to 4x. The card is an 8x AGP but I know that it's reverse compatible with 1x, 2x and 4x. In 2x mode, windows would boot but when I run a game, a BSOD would come up. Have set the AGP to 1x and works like a charm! Everything works even games and hasn't had a problem up to now. That's weird but shouldn't it work better on 4x?

I spent all afternoon to figure out what the problem was, and it was only in the AGP speed, which should have been set to 1x. Z

Hope this might help with user having problems with an old AGP card especially a geforce fx5500 from inno3d. My suggestion is: stay away from that card, but if it's your last option, still, don't buy it.

Zeldascorn.

It sounds like you had a time of it Zeldascorn!

Thanks for sharing with the rest of us

Smokeycheech