Fird's Domain

ATi + VIA = Headache

I think quite a number of us facing this typical issue. Last week my GF’s housemate just bought her PC, which contains a motherboard made with VIA Chipsets and paired with an ATi Radeon 9550. One morning, she asked why her screen flickers like mad at times, and why does the monitor went blank, then back on at random times, popping out the “ATi VPU Recover” message, offering a service to send a “Report” to ATi.

I then, realized that it has been similar case with me, my PC is equipped with a buggy KT400 Chipset (which is from VIA) plus a Radeon 92xx series (a cheap-ass replacement for my long-lost Maya *sniff*). I’m having similar problem too. Mine is worst. Upon the graphic driver crash, all my hardware-acceleration is gone. That means, ultra-laggy browsing (software rendering), annoyingly slow file browsing, and guess what? NO GAMES! (yeah. until reboot).

So being a pissed, curious and highly annoyed (and cashless *sniff*) geek of all times, I called (opened) Google and find out. Turned out theres millions (exaggerating) of them with similar problems. After pooling their “workarounds”, I’ve come to these, tried them out and so far I don’t have any weird glitches that annoys hell out of me.

Workaround in BIOS

1. Video BIOS Shadow (or Video BIOS Cacheable) - DISABLED
2. AGP Aperture Size - 64MB (Mine was 128MB, I don’t think this would effect much, but let’s just try)
3. AGP Fast Write - DISABLED (Seems to be one of the culprits)
4. AGP WS Masters - DISABLED
5. Assign IRQ for VGA - ENABLED
6. VGA Palette Snoop(ing) - DISABLED
7. System BIOS Cacheable - DISABLED
8. Resource Control - AUTO
9. PnP OS Installed - YES
10. APIC - DISABLED (This seems to be the big culprit)
11. AGP Speed - 4x (I lowered from 8x and it seems to give a big impact on stability)

I’ve rebooted after the changes above, use my comp normally, and after around 15 minutes or so, it happened again. I did a further research and found out that I could try to disable my ‘Write Combining’ feature and see if it helps, because it seems to help quite a number of users.

Where can you find this setting? Well, head on the ‘Display Properties‘, and then under ‘Settings‘ tab, click the ‘Advanced‘ button. You should be able to see a tab called ‘Troubleshoot‘ (see figure above).

This is how some people does it:
- First, they disable the write combining, reboot and test their PCs.
- If it still fails, slide the ‘Hardware Acceleration‘ one step to the left (to disable some non-important acceleration).

I did until the ‘Disable Write Combining’ step (the first step) and my pc now seems rock-solid. I’ll play with it for a few days and see how it is. Will update if I encountered any more problems :)

I hope this would help those people that are lost out there.