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I've just upgraded from a PIII 800 on a jetway mobo with intel 815ep chipset, to a PIV 2Gig on Abit TH7-II RAID with 1GB of pc800 RAMBUS.

I'm using my old o/s (Win98), my old HDD (Seagate 20G) and was using my old graphics card (GF2 Ti).
The problem is installing the AGP card. Initially I plugged in the HDD and booted with no problems except the default display of 640x480 in 16 col. Several attempts at installing the card with different versions of detonator made no difference. Windows sees the card, installs it ok, going through all the motions of building the driver database etc, even naming it correctly. The problem is it wont give me even the default vga display, never mind letting me configure any other options. so I think, perhaps its the card. So now I have a GF4 Ti4200, and I also have the same problem, no vga!! no nothing except the default display res. No conflicts, absolutely nothing obvious to me at all. I've tried newer versions of the 850 chipset drivers, new versions of detonator drivers, and re-formatting and install of win98,...nothing. I'm thinking it may be the o/s and the 850 chipset, or the o/s and the RAMBUS, but I can't find anything that points to these symptoms. Some kind person please give me some pointers, I'm very very depressed, as you could imagine.

http://www.tweak3d.net/faq/faq.cgi

From the GeForce FAQ:

Q. When I install my GeForce I can only set the card to use 640x480 with 16 colours. How can I fix it?

Make sure that you have 'Assign IRQ to VGA' set in your BIOS setup.

Make sure that you have uninstalled all old video drivers using the uninstallation programs provided, and also try uninstalling old NVIDIA drivers as described in the 'How can I completely uninstall old NVIDIA GeForce or Creative Labs Annihilator drivers?' question.

Make sure that you have installed the latest AGP drivers for your motherboard's chipset.

Make sure that you have the correct monitor drivers installed. If you are using the standard Windows monitor drivers and your monitor does not have specific drivers available, try a different Windows monitor driver.[/b]

I can get the card to run fine on my old system, graphics on IRQ11, standard PnP monitor drivers from win98 disk, etc
The problem is the new mobo.
IRQ11 is ok, no conflicts
Drivers make no difference, Ive tried loads
Why shouldn't the monitor work? This would actually make sense of what is happening tho, is it due to win98 not being able to support the 850 chipset properly without the monitors specific drivers?
It's a Hansol 501P, this is about the only thing I haven't tried,
THANKS FOR THE TIP.

1GB of pc800 RAMBUS.

OMG mate, running 1gb of RAM with Win98SE as the OS is suisidle, here's why.......

1) Only the first 128Mb of RAM is sent through the cache.This may seem OK for many uses, but there's another problem with this. Windows allocates programs to RAM addresses in a "top down" manner. This means that Windows puts things in the highest addresses of RAM first, and works backwards towards the lowest addresses. The implication of this is that if you have 256Mb RAM for example, as soon as you load a program Windows will place it into the highest RAM address available, which will be somewhere outside the first 128Mb RAM, and it will not be cached!So to gain the best performance from Win9x, you must limit it to only 128Mb RAM, but this means many applications run out of RAM and have to use virtual memory, which is many thousands of times slower. There is no cure for this problem.

2) Windows handles large amounts of RAM incorrectly.This problem occurs if more than 512Mb RAM is installed on any system having a Win9x OS. (Windows Me included)Due to the way in which the file system cache subsystem - VCache, allocates memory for itself, on systems with large amounts of RAM, the VCache can occupy all of the virtual address space on the system. With 32-bit computers, the total addressable memory space is limited to 4Gb, VCache uses the memory address space between 3 and 4Gb for the file system cache. But if there is plenty of RAM in a system, VCache may use up all of the available virtual address space, leaving no space to create new processes. This causes Windows to give "out of memory" errors amongst other things.

I recommend a install of WinXP/2000 as these can cache 4096mb of RAM, and do not suffer from Memory leakage problems as Win98SE does!

Yeah i kinda thought that might be the cause. Bloody arse! I've no blanks otherwise I could run it with 256mb.
Thanks for your help mate, much appreciated!!

when you reformatted your hard drive did you reinstall all of your motherboard drivers?...my brother had the same problem but on a cheap old motherboard with a geforce2...everything would load but be in low resolution wiht 16 colors nomatter what drivers he used. When he tried changing the resolution and colors the computer would freeze. So then installing all the drivers that were on his motherboard driver cd and that fixed the problem. He also used windows 98

Yeah i kinda thought that might be the cause. Bloody arse! I've no blanks otherwise I could run it with 256mb.
Thanks for your help mate, much appreciated!!

Hi mate. Your lucky that your system even loads into the Win98SE GUI interface, there is a cure for the memory leakage problem though, but it "doesn't" cure the fact that Win98SE only caches 128mb and doesn't recognise memory properly above 512mb and certainly above 768mb (your running 1024mb!), here it is.....

The cure for this problem is as follows.
Edit the c:\windows\system.ini file, locate the [VCache] header and enter the following lines exactly as they appear.
MinFileCache=524288
MaxFileCache=524288

This ensures that VCache will allocate a fixed 512Mb (524288K) of address space for itself. Thus leaving another 512Mb of free space in the 3-4Gb are (called the system arena).

This will help matters, but I still strongly recommend an install of WinXP/2000 to overcome this problem you have properly. Anyway, hope it all goes well.

HOORAY!! !!!!!
GF4 in all it's Glory!!
Although I'm guessing not for very long unless I stick to apps that don't ask for much RAM.
Will it use the RAM and then not get it back so that it will eventually crash or display a 'not enough memory' syntax?? Can I use a memory zipper to keep freeing it up? or do I still not understand fully what you've said? Is this a problem with win98 not actually seeing the memory it's got and therefore once it's been allocated it can't do anything about it anyway?
What if for now I use blank rimms (kinda defeats the object I know) but I'm not exactly in a position to lay out for a new o/s right now. This'll give me 256MB, will it cope with that ok?

Thanks for all your help mate, I've been struggling all weekend with this, it's great to see it up and running!

Hi mate. Yeah, 256mb will be fine, that's well within the limits of Win98SE, even though it will only cache half that RAM (128mb of it), at least it'll still recognise all of it and thus cause a lot less problems. When you get an updated OS though, stick all that RAM back in and take the benefit of 1024mb!

hmmm... what a waste of extra ram

I run win98 and I had to do the same thing to make it run with 512M ram. Works fine for me with no trouble at all.