Voodoo 3 3000, beeps on startup

[lordnikon]

Voodoo 3 3000, beeps on startup

I have a Pentium 166mhz Packard bell M415, running Windows98 SE. I have a 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000, green PCB PCI Card, model 210-0366-001.

Before I installed any drivers, the machine would boot up on the card just fine. However, after I installed the Voodoo drivers, the machine plays one long beep, and 3 short beeps. Which would indicate a graphics card issue.

I am running the latest Official (non-third-party) Voodoo 3 drivers from FalconFly.de, along with the DirectX 8.0 beta drivers.

voodoo3-10700.zip
voodoo3-10700b.zip (DX8 beta)

I then installed Quake II, which installed DirectX 8.0 along with it, so I upgraded the voodoo drivers to the DX8 beta drivers. Quake 2 seems to be working okay. I was able to play through entire levels, change the video settings in Quake II, and the graphics card seemed to be doing its thing.

Has anyone run into this problem before?
Is it a problem with the card or the drivers?

I want everything to be working properly, and the beep sequence on startup has me concerned. Any tips or help would be appreciated!

I am also running into an issue in Quake 2 where every once and a while my character will get stuck, and my input controls all lock up. If an enemy kills me, it will kick me back into the game again, but if not, I have to reboot the machine.

[Glide]

Hi lordnikon,

you're welcome here.

The beeps on startup are related to a hardware issues. During this step your computer runs the BIOS while the device drivers are to be loaded after (with the Operative System).

A hardware component, as the video card or the system memory, could be damaged and the sequency of beeps should be explained in the motherboard's manual.

However, please unplug the power connector and remove the BIOS's battery. Then wait some minutes, restore the battery and power cable, and try to switch on the system.

If it wouldn't boot again, try to replace the video card and/or the system memory.

Let me know.

Thank you.

Bye bye

[lordnikon]

Hey Glide, thanks for welcoming me to the site!

I did a lot of research and testing with some new hardware I bought. I picked up another Voodoo 3 (2000 model) to test with. I have two Packard Bell machines, a Multimedia M415 (Pent MMX 166), and a Multimedia 550 (Cyrix M II-266). The hardware beeps using the V3-3000 happened on both computers. Since V3 drivers were in both machines, I figured the new V3-2000 card should drop right in on either system, and boot up no problem.

Well... the system was stuck at a black screen. No picture.

I wasn't sure if the V3-2000 card was dead, or there was a compatibility problem. So I put the V3-2000 into a WinXP machine. Sure enough, the card works on XP. So its not dead.

I also bought a Diamond Monster Voodoo 2 8MB card. This card works perfect in both of my Packard Bell machines.

Based on this research, I think there is a compatibility problem with the Packard Bell motherboard/riser card configuration on these machines. The Voodoo 2 card's work great, but the Voodoo 3's are having some problems despite being fully working cards.

So I will be setting up Voodoo 2 SLi configurations in both of my Packard Bell systems, as this seems to be the most compatible option at the moment.

If you have any extra insight/comments feel free to reply.

[goriath]

It has to do with bios (hardware level), so no drivers (software level) compatibility issues should be involved at that point.

Check your bios settings, for any resource conflicts (I/O Address, IRQ, etc.) and in particular be sure you don't have any of the following features enabled in the CMOS:

#Video BIOS shadow or cache
#VGA Palette Snoop or DAC Snoop
#Hidden Refresh
#Byte Merge

[lordnikon]

Hey goriath! Thanks for the advice.

I have been ordering some 2D cards for testing. When I installed a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro (S3 ViRGE DX Chipset), it also had 1 long beep, and 3 short beeps after updating the drivers.

This is when it all made sense. The 1 beep and 3 long beeps were due to a "default" graphics card conflict.

The motherboards have a S3 True64/V2 graphics chip onboard, and when you put in another graphics card that would assume responsibility for rendering 2D, the onboard card doesn't want to relinquish control to the other card. This would explain why the Voodoo 2 setup + onboard card as passthrough doesn't yield any beeps, because the V2 is 3D only.

In troubleshooting the above issues, I checked the BIOS settings, and inspected the IRQ options thoroughly. I didn't see any conflicts with IRQ settings. Also, there are no jumper or BIOS settings to disable the onboard card. So, I learned you have to disable the onboard video chipset through the device manager in Windows. Then after rebooting the computer, the beeps are no longer present. (Nice!)

So that mystery has been solved.

(The interesting thing is, even with the beeps present, the Stealth 3D Pro and V3-3000 seem to work properly.)

What is still a problem are some graphics cards rendering a black screen, or not being recognized at all. The monitor will not initialize a display when connected to the cards. It just sits turned off in standby mode. This is happening on a V3-2000 and a GeForce2 MX 200. I am still researching what could be causing this, but at the moment I am stuck on what could be the problem. Hmm... *scratches head*