I used to have a Dell Dimension 4500, P4 2.4, 1 gig ram, 5.1 trust soundcard, 2xMaxtor 40 gig hds, Sapphire ATI Radeon 9550 256 mb AGP x8. The Dell mobo can only do x4 AGP,So i decided to upgrade my mobo to the Asrock P4vm800 board.At the same time i got a new case with a new atx 350w PSU,and a new 80 gig hd to do away with my two 40 gigs. I have had nothing but problems with this board since the first time i hit the power button. To start with i was getting errors trying to install windows again,but that turned out to be my ram. Everything should be ok,but im still getting `general protection faults` when playing Americas Army.I have read on another forum that the VIA chipset has compatibility problems with ATI cards,does anyone have any info on this,or can anyone help. I have spoke to the place where i got my mobo and they tell me they have no problems running my board with the same graphics card.But this is comming from a shop that sells mainly `Trust` Hardware and wont belive me that there is such thing as a 5.1 headset,I even have one made by `TRUST`.....LOL.

I've run several ATI cards on VIA chipset MOBOs but not the ATI 9550.

As far as I know, there is no compatibility issue. If you upgraded your board simply because of the 4x vs 8x AGP, you wasted your money...there's no appreciable performance difference, especially on a card like the 9550. You also would have been better off getting the 128MB version...256MB cards are usually slower due to the RAM having a higher latency. More is not always better. Did you install the lastest VIA chipset drivers? http://www.viaarena.com/default.aspx?PageID=420&OSID=1&CatID=1070 Did you install the latest ATI Catalyst drivers (v6.5)? http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1407 Make sure to completely uninstall your old ATI drivers before installing the new one. But before installing the new one, you'll need to install Microsoft.NET Framework. There's a link to it on the driver page above.

Thats what i did straight away with the new install on the new hd. I got the new chipset drivers from Asrock and the new Catalyst 6.5 from ATI. Im running NET framework 2.0 not the 1.1 from microsoft. There were no old drivers to remove.

"I got the new chipset drivers from Asrock" They're probably the same drivers, but you should get them from VIA rather than ASRock