Hi,

I would be grateful if someone could please help me with the following problem I am experiencing with my PC which I have been fighting for months now!

My system was purchased from Evesham in 2003, and has a KT4V motherboard which can hold up to 3Gb RAM, a Radeon 9700 Pro graphics card, with an AMD XP processor. In March last year I installed a new hard disk and installed Vista Home Premium. At this time, I had no issues.

Recently I upgraded the RAM to the maximum amount (3Gb). All RAM chips are from Crucial, each 1Gb. I have three slots with 1Gb in each. All modules are DDR333(cl2.5).

When the system runs on only 2Gb RAM, there are no issues and the 9700 graphics card works fine, however when running on 3Gb (i.e. all slots occupied), the system fails to boot properly into Windows. Stops on the Blue Screen of Death with

“STOP 0X00000116 “ and complains about atikmdag.sys”

When looking in Device Manager, under System Devices, there is a problem with the VIA CPU to AGP Controller. The device gives the following error message:


“This device cannot find enough free resources that it can use. (Code 12)
If you want to use this device, you will need to disable one of the other devices on this system.
Click 'Check for solutions' to send data about this device to Microsoft and to see if there is a solution available.”

At this time, the 9700 graphics card cannot be seen in Device Manager and is not being used.

When disabling the VIA CPU to AGP Controller, with 3Gb of RAM, the system boots normally and seems to work fine, but the Radeon Pro 9700 card is not showing up in Device Manager and is not being used (presumably because the VIA CPU to AGP Controller is disabled).

When the system is running on 2Gb of RAM, it boots normally and there are no problems in Device Manager (VIA CPU to AGP Controller works fine, Radeon 9700 card listed and working fine). Note, when I put one of my old 256MB modules in slot 3 (giving 2.25 Gb) the system works fine.

I have re-installed Vista, unplugged all other PCI devices, cleared CMOS, upgraded my BIOS to the latest, installed Version 5.14A of the Hyperion Pro drivers from VIA and installed the latest drivers from Ati for the Radeon 9700 PRO card. – but sadly no joy!

I have noticed that after installing the VIA CPU to AGP Controller driver (XP diver in 5.15A of Hyperion 4 in 1 drivers), it works fine (with the 3Gb in place). In Device Manager it is now shown as: VIA CPU to AGP 2.0/ AGP 3.0, however, the problem now is that the Radeon Pro 9700 card doesn’t work. I installed the latest driver from ATi (7.12 20/12/07), however in Device Manager this is showing a problem with the following message:

“Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)”.

Any help would be greatly appreciated with regard to what I should do to resolve this / what drivers I should install / order of installation etc….. anything!!!

I just can’t understand why all works fine with 2Gb but not with 3Gb!

Am I correct in saying, when a driver doesn’t exist for Vista, you still shouldn’t use the XP one?......but instead, accept the Microsoft provided driver which came with Vista)?

Thanks in advance,
Neil. Idential problem but with different hardware. Same problem occurs with XP32, XP64, Vista32 and Vista64 with an nVidia card and 3GB RAM and an IP35 pro mobo. (Also get problems with ATI cards too... so confused with this I 'm stumped). When I take out the 512mb stick, leaving 2.5gb, and hey presto, a stable system. WTF?

Computers & Internet - Abit - IP35P Motherboard