Video Woes - Help!

Okie... so, this isn't a SecondLife technical issue at this point, so I wanted to see if I could enlist the help of the diversity of people here.

Last week, my friend bought parts for a computer, and had me put them together. I played SecondLife as a part of deciding whether to give him his PCI (regular, not express) video card back, or have him use the onboard video. Well, needless to say, the onboard video was WAY better, surprisingly enough.

I was so impressed, I decided to buy the same setup for myself, even though the video card I just bought is AGP - I figured I didn't need it, and wouldn't need to worry about getting a new video card for a while, so I could save myself a couple bucks not getting a MB with both AGP and PCI express.

Well, I got the stuff a couple days ago... put everything together... installed all drivers... everything looked great. Installed secondlife, went to run it - nothing. Figured out directX9 hadn't been installed along with the drivers, so did that... tried again, black screen. Updated drivers, still black screen. Uninstalled and installed different drivers, still black screen. Finally went into directX and tested direct3d - sure enough, the '7' test gave me a blinking grey box instead of spinning black and green box, and 8 and 9 tests gave me just a black screen. I tweaked a couple things, still couldn't get it, and decided maybe trying to run a directX9 game without directX9 installed messed something up, so completely formatted the HD and started from the beginning.

After I got everything installed, I tried again, just with the direct3d test. Still the same thing.

Soooo... does this sound like a b0rked motherboard? Maybe just b0rked BIOS? I DID update the BIOS before I'd tested anything... and afterward read something about not updating the BIOS in that particular MB... could that be it? Also, does anyone else have this board, and has experienced anything similar?

The board is a BIOSTAR Tforce6100-939 rev 1.1, and the video chipset is an onboard 256MB GeForce 6100

Update your VGA BIOS. Probably need to update your VIA 4in1 drivers which will update your OpenGL version to 2.0 which is what Second Life requires.

And relying on onboard video over a independant GPU is probably highly ill advised. More than likely if you were getting better performance from onboard video than you were from a PCI graphics card the PCI graphics card must have been extremely old.

Theres no mainboard video on any mainboard made that will outperform an independant GPU unless the independant GPU is incredibly antiquated.

I should probably edit this to point out that while the Nvidia 6100 chipset isn't a bad chipset, any onboard video system draws resources away from your CPU and physical memory.

And regardless the 6100 chipset itself is the effective equivalent of an MX chipset with a few new DX9 capabilities and thats about it. Don't let the big memory numbers fool you (cause big memory numbers quite often fool people when it comes to video cards), the true power of any video rendering system is in the GPU itself. Nvidia's chipset releases have always proven that the higher end chipsets (x600 - x900) are the better chipsets in the lines. So usually an x000 - x500 chipset is considered low end, or budget graphics processors and are not going to have the full rendering power of the higher end chipsets...and most especially will not have the same rendering power as a higher end chipset using an independant GPU.

Eer... there's no VIA stuff on the MB... so I can't exactly update the VIA 4in1 drivers... or am I missing something? I'm using the latest Nvidia MB chipset drivers, as well. I also already updated the BIOS

And the video card I was comparing against was a 256MB Geforce5600... not sure of the rest... fx? something like that? I'll have to look at the card later. I can assure you, EVERYTHING about it when I was playing with the other machine was way better than with the PCI card in it. The AGP card I have is the same thing, but in AGP. Getting this MB was just a temporary 'save money 'til I can get the PCI express video card I really WANT, with a performance boost over what I already have' kind of thing... doesn't matter that it doesn't get perfect performance, I just know that direct3d should at least be somewhat working, onboard video or not.

Sounds familiar to me, this black screen stuff. The simple solution for me was to turn down the monitor refresh frequency. Black screen gone. Don't ask me why.

Almost all Intel based mainboards have a VIA chipset. This is the chipset which controls the PCI/AGP bus and OpenGL settings.

Waaaait... huh?

So... if VIA controls certain things on the MB, wouldn't the MB driver cd have the VIA 4in1 drivers bundled with it...?

*edit* Or is this a case where the VIA drivers are with Windows, not the driver CD, and since I'm on 2k instead of XP, I may have an old version... or...?

Sorry, I just always thought that if a MB is VIA, it's VIA... if it's Intel, it's Intel, and if it's Nforce, it's Nforce... with some differences being like, the IDE stuff *usually* being a standard (though nvidia has its own too), ethernet being <insert chipset here>, etc?

Just checked- your board doesnt use VIA drivers. It uses Nvidia drivers. Try downloading them from Nvidia.

The catch with onboard video is, it draws from system resources. So now Windows not only needs RAM for aaaaallll those background resources (svchost, etc), any anti-virus/spyware programs running, and those other odds & ends you end up installing that sit in the system tray, but now it needs to use that RAM for video too, which can pretty much grind you to a halt.

If the BIOS was borked, the board itself wouldnt even work


And To Ashes: It's an AMD board, either the Socket 754 or 939

Oh thank god. I thought my whole bases of knowledge had just been turned upside-down!

BUT... I already DID get the newest stuff from nvidia.

And it's 939... Biostar Tforce6100-939 ... I thought I'd said that. My brain hurts now!

*edit again*

Oh, and when I was wondering about the BIOS, I meant maybe it messes up the video part of the MB. For example, I know this particular MB had a BIOS release that b0rked the onboard ethernet.

I've also got 2GB RAM... my friends' computer (which is the same) worked perfectly with the onboard video and only 1GB RAM... and that was *after* I installed everything on top of XP... this is a raw install of win2k with *nothing* but chipset drivers and DirectX9.

It was the same way with raw win2k + all updates + directx9.

How much RAM are you using too?

Part of the problems: SL uses OpenGL, not DirectX (wish it would tho), the 6100 is a further cut-down version of the 6200 which itself is the lowest of the 6xxx series.

You could update drivers for the video itself (if any) & Check which version of OpenGL you're using.

At the same time though, this could be the computers' way of saying "I cant do this with what I have!!"

I've got 2GB... DDR400... AMD64 2.4 ghz... already tried the video drivers themselves... again, I built this same computer last week and it works fine.

I figured the problem with direct3d had to be related to the whole video problem.

One thing I don't know - how do I find out what version of OpenGL I'm using?

*sobs* Just disabled the onboard video and put in the PCI card... and I'm getting 4 fps, with EVERYTHING turned all the way down. I was getting freaking 15-20 using this same card on a 1ghz machine with 512MB RAM, with almost everything turned on/up. This is utterly ridiculous. Not just that, but the onboard video keeps trying to steal stuff even though it's disabled in both the BIOS and in windows. Seriously, I just can't win. I had also been getting 15-20 fps on the twin machine using the onboard video last week, with EVERYTHING turned on and up. Argh. What the heck am I doing wrong?

Hmmm, might be a faulty motherboard. They can do some strange things.

And do you mean PCI or PCI-Express? Hopefully PCI-E! PCI is slow for video.

*faceplants* PCI. Regular. It was MUCH faster than this on a 1ghz machine with less ram and stuff. With the same PCI, regular, card.

I just upgraded the motherboard's BIOS again (I found one in a different spot, on the same Biostar website, that's more recent. Go figure) and took out the PCI card. Now instead of having the strange 'greenish' background, it's the regular blue background... but no directx stuff works, nor OpenGL stuff.

At this point, the only thing the other computer had that this didn't was XP... and I only have an... um... *coughcough* unofficial copy of XP, which seems to be an old version that won't load on an AMD64.

Seriously, I have this curse. People bring their broken computers to fix, and have me build them computers left and right, and theirs always works perfectly. But me, buy the SAME FREAKING STUFF and make my own? Nope! This happened with my most recent computer, that I'm trying to replace, as well.