Okay.. I have been getting progressively ticked off as of late. I've upgraded my Graphics card yet again on my HP 8720 Pavillion. The only original piece of the system left is the motherboard. the wonderful A7V-VM.

I used to have a GeForce4 ti4600 128MB on the board, and it worked perfectly. But since the card's fan died, I had to switch to a BFG GeForce FX 5500OC. It works when it wants to, but in certain games, some funky crap starts to happen. In the new Leisure Suit Larry game, the game freezes after a certain amount of time and then starts to display overlapping objects and gives the "clipping" effect. If I alt-tab out, and go back in.. There are artifacts all over the models, and everything seems to be red.

Call of Duty likes to flash alot, and make objects dissapear.

And Half Life 2... Is really ticking me off... It's doing the same thing as LSL. It'll run fine for a bit, and then just act funky. 50% of the time, I get a BSOD that says
"page_fault_in_nonpaged_area" in the nv4_disp.dll

This is very frustrating. I have the latest Forceware drivers, and the latest BIOS Upgrade from the HP site...

4x AGP is set in the BIOS, and the arpeture is 128MB.

My system:

1 Ghz AMD Athlon
512 MB SDRAM 133mhz
GeForce FX 5500
A7V-VM HP tagged MoBo

Is there a BIOS upgrade out there from Asus that will work with my BIOS and fix this problem? Or am I screwed?

Thanks.

what is the wattage of your power supply? is it up to the job?
Does the new card have a separate power connector on it?
Have you defintely closed all other programs before you start the game?

I don't know the wattage. It doesn't say on
the PSU itself.. But I would say it's 250-
300. Whatever was standard for an HP
Pavillion in 2000.

The new card does not have a seperate power
connector.

The only program running is nwiz.exe, and
whatever normal windows processes are
needed.

Well.. my PSU is a whopping 185W. Wow, I didn't know it was that crappy. But what baffles me is that my older ti4600 card used to work flawlessly, now it does the same thing as my 5500... I've just ordered a Rosewill case from NewEgg that comes with a 400W PSU of plus quality.. So we'll see if that solves the problem.. If not, I need to bite the bullet and get the mobo..

I have the exact same problem as you, LilGryphMaster...it's definitely a driver problem. When I run Half-Life 2, I get as far as "Let's just say your time has come aga........" during the GMan opening cutscene and Kablam, Blue screen of death... it tells me PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA, and makes a reference to nv4_disp.dll. I have tried EVERYTHING...reinstalled the drivers, updated windows in every possible way, flashed my bios, installed fresh new motherboard drivers, and gone as far as reformatting several times to fix this. With or without the service packs, with dx 9.0b or 9.0c etc the problem remains. The only way I can run the game is with 56.56 drivers on my nvidia CD. The game runs very smoothly, but of course looks like crap. Same visual artifacts...in-game the characters have no faces, everything is red and yellow and pixellated.
I've got an A7M266 Motherboard, 384 MB DDR, GeForce FX 5200 Asylum (256 MB), and a giant headache. Funny thing is, Doom 3 runs like a dream. No problems whatsoever.

Incidentally, installing the new nvidia drivers kills the directx 7 renderer. Try running dxdiag, run the direct3d tests, and lemme know if the first of three tests gives you a black screen like it does for me.
This is shoot-yourself-in-the-head frustrating, cause I can't play older games, like Aliens vs predator. I get no video but the audio is there. Guess it's driver rollback time...

Holy Crap, that's exactly what I've been doing SixMarbles.. But I don't think any of the drivers worked for me.. Except the ones on the CD and the latest beta drivers. It's driving me bonkers.

But here is a more recent post I've been putting on some other boards to find some answers:

Okay.. So, I've been hopping all over different forums trying to find a reasonable solution or theory as to why my computer is being strange.. So here's my story:

Okay.. So I've been running on an old Asus A7V-VM MoBo that came packaged with an 8720 HP Pavillion. The processor is a 1 GHz Athlon, and the RAM has been upgraded to 512 MB SDRAM. I'm running one Sony CD-RW 52 X drive, and 2 HD. One 40GB Western Digital, and one 160GB Maxtor (which is damn loud, but I'm not complaining because it was only $40) I also have 2 fans connected.

When this problem first appeared, I was running with a 185W PSU and no fans... and a 20 GB Generic HD instead of the 160GB... My Gfx card at that time was an older GeForce 4 ti4600 128MB card. It was running like a beauty, but then the fan became wobbly. I didn't give it a second thought, until games started crashing, or showing funky displays.

I switched out the GFX card for a newer BFG OC GeForce FX5500 and the problem worsened. I updated to the latest ForceWare, and some games decided to work and some didn't.

I figured it was my weak PSU, so I just recently ordered a new Rosewill case with a decent 400W PSU. Everything hooked in, still no dice.

Right now, this is what has been happening.

On the latest normal release forceware drivers, Call of Duty runs, but displays flashy graphics, and lighting is very buggy and casts wrong. Artificats scatter the screen, and the game is virtually unplayable. Half-Life 2 does not show any of these effects, but after playing 5 minutes the game freezes and wipes out the HUD display and everything ceases to render... Leaving a mess of polygons and textures wobbling around.

With the latest BETA forceware drivers, Call of Duty works flawlessly (at least, to my eyes it is fine) no crashes or artifacts or nothing.. But Half-Life shows the same attitude. and usually results in a BSOD which I cannot read, because the system quickly restarts.

I decided to see if any other games ran correctly. Serious Sam runs fine, but cannot display reflections correctly.

Something is going on. I used to think it was a hardware issue, but now I'm thinking it's a DirectX issue.. But I know nothing about DirectX. Other than that it's an SDK used to run the visual part of games.

I have the latest windows updates, everything is as new as can be..

If DirectX is the problem, is there a way I can downgrade to 9.0a or b or even DX8?

I'm ready to do anything here... I want to play Half-Life 2, damnit!

System Specs:

1 GHz AMD Athlon
512 MB SDRAM
Asus A7V-VM MoBo
GeForceFX 5500 128MB BFGTech OC
400W Rosewill PSU

Thanks in advance!

I've tried underclocking before, and it didn't seem to make any difference. But I will try it again with the BETA drivers...

I use Driver Cleaner 3 before I try to install a new driver, in safe mode...

Runnin' Out of Ideas Here

Well hot damn.. I switched my old card back in.. (after tightening the fan screws.. WHY DIDN'T I SEE THOSE BEFORE?!) and everything seems to work (so far)

Anyone want to buy a card?

Well.. Spoke too soon. HL2 still doesn't work. It runs better now, but I still get a BSOD...

So it definitely has to be software related. Wheter it be Drivers or DirectX. I read DirectX9 and the Source engine go hand in hand. All the pretty stuff can only be run with DirectX9 and advanced Gfx Cards, where as 8.1 is limited. Could this be a conflict?

I'm having problems with my geforce 5500 as well. The bios on my motherboard says agp is set to 4x, but when I check on the NV applet it says 2x. Is there a way to set the agp speed other than through the bios? why doesn't the bios match the nv applet (or 3d mark)?
Oh, and halflife 2 runs like a pig. I can get all the graphics features to work, just at slide show frame rates with occasional crashes to desktop. But that's because my processor is only a 866.
I'm using a via kt133 motherboard with the 4 in 1 drivers.

Hi!

I´ve had exactly the same problems as you guys: Page_fault_in_nopaged_area etc...

It´s driving me mad!!!

Even worse, HL2 neither runs with ATI Radeon 8500 LE 128 MB nor with NVidia GeForce FX 5200, no matter what versions of drivers I install. The ATI graphics work slightly better, but at some point I always get black triangles all over the screen, increasing in size until the screen stays black with some awkwardly red triangles...

I think it´s a problem caused by HL2 itself, because Doom3, Gothic2 and so on all run smoothly

So hopefully all these issues will be fixed soon...

Chris

I'm starting to believe it's a HL issue aswell.

Sorry for the hiatus...now then, Doom 3 runs absolutely fine for me as well. However, Half-Life 2 does the same thing for me...runs fine for several seconds, maybe 40 frames a second, then suddenly gives me about one frame every three seconds. this particular difficulty seems to be an artifact of the game code, and not our systems.

"We are still investigating another performance problem on some hardware, which will manifest where the game is getting into a state where performance drops to less than 5 fps and does not recover or crashes."

-Current Steam News

LilGryphMaster, you can't uninstall or downgrade directx as is, but you can search for a 3rd party directx uninstaller, at your own risk of course.

So I've tried just about everything I can think of. It's gotta be this: What do we all have in common, besides not being able to run these games? Aging ASUS boards. Boom. Come to think of it, on the dozens of forums I've visited about this problem, everyone seems to have an asus board.

Ah, and about the blue screen not being visible for more than a split second before the restart...
Go into the 'System Properties' dialog (same place from which you can access device manager) and look under the 'Advanced' tab. In the box labelled 'Startup and Recovery', click Settings. Once there, deselect the box labelled 'Automatically restart'. That gives you a chance to read the BSOD and at least have a clue.

My BSOD lists several memory addresses, slightly different each time. I've looked them up in Device Manager, and the addresses in the BSOD all make reference to 'System Board' and 'PCI Bus'. Hope that helps.

Something about XP, nVidia and ASUS. They just don't like each other and there's no way around it.

Spose I'm just going to have to wait for Christmas. I'm one of those who don't need any real presents, just money. Guess what I've told the relatives I want for Christmas :)

So I'm going to use that moolah to buy a new board, processor, and DDR. Gordon Freeman will be mine, I swear!

Ah, wait. This may or may not be the fix for you guys, but I just recently ironed out a number of game crash issues by turning off ACPI so that I might select my own IRQ's. It's in Device manager, under the 'Computer' entry. Select 'Standard Computer rather than the ACPI one that's already there. Beware: I am unable to restore the old driver for ACPI. Not that it makes any difference, I still get all the BSOD's. But still, it lets you assign a single IRQ to your video card, instead of 5 devices all on IRQ 9. I was experiencing a number of strange drops in performance and many sound artifacts until I separated the devices. But unless you are having similar problems, don't do it.

I don't think I'll mess with that.

I'm doing the same as you. New MoBo, CPU, and DDR. But I was going to get an Asus again.. What $50-$75 range board would you reccomend?

I'm ordering a new board from compu-best, an A7N8X-E Deluxe. Looks sweet, and was personally recommended to me by a tech at BFG. I'm going to get an Athlon XP 2600+. The board and processor are each just under $130. Also, Kingston DDR, 512 MB for about $150.

LilGryphMaster, take a look at this review. It's the cheapest 'current' ASUS MoBo, and I think you'll find it suitable.
http://www.mbreview.com/a7v8xx.php

It's got overheat protection, AGP 8X, supports a 333 MHz front side bus, and up to 2 PC3200 chips or 3 PC2700 or previous.
Be sure to flash and update BIOS; it's shipped with 1003 version and I believe the current one is 1007.

Good luck :p

Thanks for the advice, but I'm way ahead of you :)

My christmas list also has an A7N8X on it. Along with an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ and 2 sticks of 256MB Rosewill PC3200 DDR RAM. All for $235 from Newegg.

I can't wait.

Argh...it's the video card. I've got that nice A7N8X-E Deluxe board and 512 MB Kingston PC3200 ValueRAM with 3ms CAS. Instead of the 2600+, I got a Barton Athlon XP 3200+. All of my games run beautifully...for a short while. Games with vsync enabled are running right at 60 fps and with it disabled are running higher. The only game that doesn't have this problem (at least not en masse) is Doom 3. Again, my card is the BFG Asylum GeForce FX 5200 256MB w/ dual 450 MHz RAMDAC. That's the only common hardware from my old A7M266 machine, but I get the same problems. I've looked this problem up for the hundredth time and it seems the card is infamous for this.

Tried:
Uninstalling Service Pack 2
Flashing to current BIOS (1013)
Cleaning and Installing current ForceWare MoBo Drivers
Cleaning and Installing current GeForce drivers, including trying beta drivers
Upping the voltage on my RAM and AGP bus
Tweaking various BIOS settings, including but not limited to:
AGP bandwidth
Shadowing
AGP FastWrite
Primary VGA BIOS
Underclocking
AGP Aperture size
et cetera...

No luck. It's definitely the card. Probably going to do an RMA and get a 5700 or newer. Rats.

Hey, I got this freaking crappy vid card from chaintech. An nvidia fx 5700. I have a feeling it is either dead, or my agp slot has been damaged somehow. Is there any way to figure out which is the real culprit? I played and finished half life 2 with many headaches. I had millions of bsods and soon after I beat the game, the card or the mother board would crash then reboot itself almost on its own. I have tried messing around with the bios and installing new drivers, but nothing seemed to work.
I'm running an:
amd 2400xp chip
asus a78x-vm/400 motherboard
win xp
512 megs of ram
audigy gamer creatives lab soundcard.

my onboard video works fine, but won't work with any of the higher end games. I bought the 5700 and really feel as though I wasted my money. Is there a tool that can check my agp slot?

im a bonehed

I have heard about a lot of nVidia problems in Half-life 2...in fact it detects my card as directx 8 (GeForce FX 5200 256 MB) when in fact it is a DX9 capable card. I've ordered a 5700 ultra anyways but the point is that Doom 3 has no problems and runs quite well with this card whereas HL2 crashes constantly. I have heard from my manufacturer's tech support line that HL2 is designed as an ATI showcaser so I'm not surprised that we both have this problem. I get 60 fps in HL2 for a few minutes (vsync enabled), then BSOD pointing at nv4_disp.dll. Anyways, the 5700 is quite a good buy, so I wouldn't ditch it until you have exhausted all options. Try it in a friend's machine and see if you get the same problems. Also, are other games crashing as well? If not, I have heard that there is an nVidia fix for HL2. if other games are crashing, I'd try a reformat and reinstall of windows.

Ah, here's something... when you upgrade your video card, you may be significantly increasing your power usage as well. How many hard drives and peripherals are you using? Maybe the bus just can't provide enough power for the card. What's the wattage of your power supply?

Also, get the latest mobo drivers and perhaps try the beta GeForce drivers from nvidia.com. Didn't work for me, but worth a shot. If you are feeling like a champ, get the latest bios for your mobo from asus.com and look up a website with the most recent video card bios as well.

Hi Guys....

I think have the answer for you and it is Hardware related. It is so simple your PC's are out of date and this is why Half Life 2 won't work. The graphics engines from DOOM3 and HL2 and Call of Duty are very differant. I have two PC's.....

1. Gigabyte GA-VT600, AGP8x, Socket A
AMD Athlon XP 2600+ running at 2300mhz OC
512mb pc3200 DDR
2x 40Gb seagate hdd
GFX 5200 128mb (s---)
Directx 9.0c and Detonator v56.72
Windows XP Pro
400w PSU

2. Aopen Socket A mobo, AGP4x
AMD Athlon TBird 1.4ghz
1gb memory
Leadtek Winfast GeForce4 440 se 64mb
1x 40gb seagate hdd
16x DVD rom
400w PSU
Windows XP Pro
Directx 9.0c & Detonator v56.72

Ok HL2, Call of Duty and Doom3 work percectly on PC 1, and On PC 2 HL2 is doing the same to me as you. But if i put the Leadtek card in PC 1 it plays all the Games faster and smoother than the GFX5200 but there are not as many feature effects as the GFX5200 which is AGP8x and the leadtek AGP4x.

I hope this info help relive those head aches.

Its not Software its Hardware this is why you have had no luck your looking in the wrong place for the answer.

Piece out from CompyTech17

Ummmmmmmm...... you all are wong Half life 2 works so FINE on me computar, have a FX5200 and i can run it all on high setting on 1024x786 or something, and no LAG AT ALL, so basicly any card can run i as long as its beter than a FX5200 and i get 50 to 70 FPS, so thats quite GOOD A,
Well i hope this info helps yous alls.
p.s.... message from wise wise MAN :)

OK then

If you say we are wrong and you are right then what you say is also wrong because a fx5200 is what replaced the g4 440mx and my 440mx runs HL2, NFSU2 and Doom3 alot smoother and better than the fx5200 in the same system. Beside the fact the the 440mx is leadtek. and what are your system specs.

HL2, NFSU2 and Doom3 are very processor intense they need processor speed aswell as video card speed.

"pikinini"

"FX5200 and i get 50 to 70 FPS, so thats quite GOOD A"

I don't know where you pulled this from but i sure as hell know that my fx5200 only gets to about 24-30 fps on lowest settings you must have some kind of super card or your just talking alot of ****.

Piece out CompyTech

Well.. sorry if i have hurt your fellings :).
My specs are as followed..
-800mhz or something
-pentium 4 or something
-of course a FX5200
-dual 250mhz or something with the card
-2.81ghz(2cpus)
-512ram
-directX 9.0c(4.09.0000.0904)
um.. thinks thats all i know.

Hi, I have a 1.4 Athlon AMD, with a GeForce Ti4200 and get the BSOD page_fault error all the time at the G-man intro scene (I'll get it even earlier if I turn the graphics up in the game options). I think SixMarbles is right... I think it's the card, because all my other games work fine. I'm waiting to see if SixMarbles has had better luck with a newer card. I might invest in one as well.