ASRock 939Dual AGP Driver Problems

[Kektek]

Hi, I'm posting because there was a thread here a few months back concerning problems with the AGP drivers for the ASRock 939Dual motherboard. No one solution seemed to work for anyone, although several were suggested.

So far I've tried a large number of the proposed solutions and none of them seem to work. The process goes something like this. I install the AGP drivers for the ASRock card (from ULi 2.13 integrated drivers), then restart, then install the ATI drivers, then restart, and then a few moments after windows starts the system will reboot itself. After that reboot, the computer is stable, but the AGP functionality is basically nonexistant. The system device section of device manager lists the UGI AGP Controller 3.0, the add/remove programs list has the ULi AGP to PCI driver listed, and the ATI drivers are installed, but in 3DMark06 the AGP functionality is clearly disabled as the aperture is displayed as 0 and the performance is horrible. I was able to run World of Warcraft without any problems, but obviously the AGP drivers are not functioning well enough for more intensive applications such as 3DMark06 and games like BF2.

I think I've tried almost everything that I've seen suggested online without any success. I've enabled the AGP Fifo option under the BIOS advanced tab, as that helped some people with NVidia cards (mine is ATI, but I wanted to try). I've tried several iterations of the driver program, including 2.3 and 2.13, both seperately and as part of the integrated driver installation program. The system is usually stable after I install the AGP driver, but once I install the ATI drivers (having finished the AGP driver installation previously), the system will reboot soon after starting Windows. The first time I tried it the AGP driver alone would force the system to restart, and I actually had to reinstall Windows because the glitch made it impossible to go in and uninstall the driver. After I installed Windows and updated through SP2, the crash problem became a one-time event followed by stability.

I believe someone named <JNT> Raptor was very confident about the combination of this motherboard and ATI cards, saying he'd used such a combination for several computers with no problems. However, I followed his recommended method very closely and I still had a system crash after installing the ATI drivers and when it was stable it again registered no AGP functionality. The process was: uninstall ATI drivers using add/remove programs, uninstall AGP driver using the same, restart, install AGP driver, restart, check to see if AGP Controller 3.0 was listed under system devices (device manager), if so install video card drivers and finally restart.

I bought this board, a new processor, and new memory in order to stop bottlenecking my mid-range AGP card, but the performance boost will be pretty severely hampered if the card itself can't utilize AGP. Does anyone have a solution to this problem? I'm willing to try any walkthrough or guide if it means getting my AGP card to work properly. The other two options are getting a new motherboard or getting a new PCI-E video card, but both of those plans are expensive and undesirable. I'd prefer getting my Radeon x850 pro to work as intended.

 

[Kektek]

Ok, I'm trying one of the most commonly suggested fixes again.

1. I uninstalled my ATI drivers and AGP controller using Add/Remove programs and Driver Cleaner.

2. Reboot.

3. Install the ULi Integrated Drivers 2.13 including the AGP driver.

4. Reboot.

At this point I would install my ATI drivers, but I did notice that after installing the AGP controller I now have two Video Controllers ("Video Controller" and "Video Controller (VGA)") under the "Other Devices" section of my Device Manager, apparently lacking drivers. I'm not sure what that means. Did the AGP controller not successfully install? System Devices DOES have the ULi AGP v3.0 Controller.

I'm going to try the ATI drivers now, although in my experience so far that causes the system to crash shortly after Windows loads.

 

[Kektek]

Yup, I installed the ATI drivers and as soon as Windows loaded the entire system shut down and rebooted.

At this point, I'm pretty sure the correct solution is to send back this motherboard and spend my money on one that actually works. There's a reason this thing was $70, apparently. I'd rather spend $100+ on a functional motherboard than $70 on one that won't operate correctly after 16+ hours of attempting to solve problems.

 

[Kektek]

I've made some minor progress.

I used the drivers from ASRock's website (AGP drivers 2.3) and then used device manager to install my ATI drivers from the CD. This actually got 3dmark to post my AGP aperture as 116mb. It still seems to be recognizing my card as a PCI card, although it says the bus is AGP 8x, so I'm not sure what that means. It definitely isn't recognizing the AGP slot on the motherboard section of the system diagnostics.

My 3dmark06 score is now 1635, which is higher than my score of 14xx before upgrading, so that's good. Still not sure that I've solved the problem entirely, though. I just installed the full driver and console package from ATI (CCC, I believe it's called), and I'm going to try maxing the aperture in my bios settings.

 

[Mad-Matt]

3dmark/pcmark is the fault as its systeminfo module hasnt been updated in along time to acknowledge the uli chipset properly.

Installing the agp driver and ati drivers is easy as on any other board and not an issue.
Im using an AGP X800XT with the latest Catalyst 6.5 drivers and AGP chipset options in bios are set to 256 Apature and fastwrites enabled and 8X. and also the ULI 2.30 agp driver (part of the 2.20 intergrated driver pack)

My only issue (if it even is an issue) is with PCMark05 and the 2D GFX - 64 Lines test which in my mind is running 500 fps to slow (when comparing with other profiles in the orb) and looks very jittery when running.

EDIT: Strangely the 2d 64 lines test is also 800 points or so lower in PCMark04 then when i tested card in my AXP machine :/ .
Maybe its ati drivers fault, but i cant be doing with the hassle of changing driver versions to see whats going on. Ill have to see if it improves with newer drivers when released.