Has anyone had any success with nvclock & GF4 ?

[GreenBeret]

I used this program (forget which version) to OC my GF3 in Linux (Mandrake) almost 2 years ago, and it worked great. Now I'm trying to get it to work with this GeForce4 TI4200 (Asus V9280 VS AGP 8X 128MB VIVO). Whatever clock speed I set it to, X will lock up completely with lots of fuzzy pink vertical lines. No Ctrl + Alt + ***, I'm forced to do a hard reboot. This really sucks :( I have read the author's site and he said that there's some problem with GF4 OCing, that some certain combos don't work (well for me none of them works), and that he will release version 0.7 soon to fix it. However that promise was made in March this year.... I have been searching forums + Google, but there aren't many threads on nvclock and I have found a few who have the exact same problem.

If you know the fix, or another OCing utility for Nvidia cards under Linux (I haven't been able to find anything else), please tell me :) Many thanks :cool:

[mdwatts]

I've never tried to OC any of my Nvidia video cards.

Anything in the Nvidia Linux driver readme on overclocking or in the Nvidia forums? Try searching their forums as you may find suggestions.

If not already enabled, you can add

options nvidia NVreg_EnableAGPFW=1 NVreg_EnableAGPSBA=1

to /etc/modules.conf

[GreenBeret]

Thanks for the quick reply. I have searched Nvnews (the Nvidia forum) but there's only one thread about a guy who has the same problem :/ I have played with SBA and FW, but similar to my experience in Windows, they don't do jack.

[mdwatts]

Have a search in the 'How I did it' forum as one of our members (bwkaz I believe) posted a extensive guide on the Nvidia drivers.

It was many months ago though, but should be still relevant and easy to locate with a search.

[bwkaz]

Yeah, I did, it was relevant at the time, but I'm not so sure about anymore (plus, I'm not entirely sure what I said, so ... yeah ;)).

Now, to get SBA and FW working, you just have to add an options line to /etc/modules.conf. Make it read:

options nvidia NVreg_EnableAGPFW=1 NVreg_EnableAGPSBA=1

This will work regardless of the nvidia alias that's in that file, so it'll work regardless of whether your distro uses devfs or not (and if that sentence doesn't make any sense, then feel free to completely ignore it).

If your distro doesn't use /etc/modules.conf, then it might use /etc/<something>/rc.modules. If that's the case, then that file will have a line looking like either modprobe nvidia or /sbin/modprobe nvidia. Add the NVreg_EnableAGPXXX=1 bits to the end of that line.

If your distro uses /etc/modules instead (which is just a list of module names to load), then I don't know how to add those options, unfortunately. Maybe someone else does? (hint, hint... ;))

If you edit /etc/rc.modules, then you'll want to run /sbin/depmod -a (or -ae, shouldn't matter which you use) afterward, or you'll get a warning logged every time you run modprobe after that.

Edit: There was a "how to overclock your nVidia card" thread posted in How I Did It a short time after your thread was posted here. No idea if nextbillgates (the author of the How I Did It thread) has ever done this with a GF4, but it's worth a shot. Link:

http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=106598

< search keywords >

nvidia enable SBA fastwrite fast writes sidebanding AGP

[GreenBeret]

Thanks for the link :) That guy uses a GF2 MX though.

I found a fix for my problem: which is to use the command line to OC :p The GTK one will cause the lockup described above - I used the GUI because I wanted the tweaks as well, and I've already enabled FW and SBA with these tweaks.

While I can OC now, the max OC I get in Linux (MDK 9.1) is lower than what I get in WinXP, but perhaps it's just because of different drivers and different approaches/algorithms to OC the cards (like driver vs low level HW).

Will post more findings soon :)

[bwkaz]

Originally posted by GreenBeret
I found a fix for my problem: which is to use the command line to OC :p Ahh, I will have to try that sometime. I used the GTK+ version too, back forever ago when the same thing happened to me (GF4 Ti, and as soon as I hit apply at any setting, I got an instant lockup -- I wrote it off to a crappy card, since one of the power isolation capacitors appeared to be missing when I got it).

Thanks! :)

[100prcnt Marine]

try "yanc" it werks with nvclock and has a lot more options