651M-L can't disable onboard VGA and other problems.

Question

Hello. I have the MSI 651M-L motherboard and I want to use an external AGP card (GeForce 2 MX 400) instead of the onboard. I am really confused with this board for many reasons (the PC is not mine, I should just fix it). I think that the board may be damaged. First of all, in the manual, it doesn't say a word about the external AGP card. In the BIOS, there is nothing relevant (disable onboard VGA). I thought that it is just automatic and I plugged in the external card, but the system was still working with the onboard! 2 or 3 times ONLY, the system has booted-up normally but the monitor was off. I thought then to shutdown the PC and connect the monitor to the external card. The system was working properly after that and Windows XP saw the GeForce 2. After some reboots, the system was switching again to the onboard VGA (without personally making any change)! Why is that? Why the system is switching by itself from the one VGA to the other? I have checked that the AGP card is plugged in correctly. Is there any jumper or something to disable the onboard VGA? Thanks.
PS1: Can someone explain to me, why the VGA drivers downloaded from the MSI website for this board (http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/driver/dvr/spt_dvr_detail.php?UID=478&kind=1), don't work? When I am trying to install them, an error message comes up saying that it didn't find the necessary hardware and the installation is canceled. My present drivers have date of 2002 and I want to upgrade to the latest drivers. I have made all the other driver updates (agp driver, IDE, sound, LAN etc).
PS2: Is it true that this board doesn't have any option for overclocking? I have a P4 at 2.4 GHz. I didn't find anything in the BIOS. I can't believe it. Are there any hidden options?
PS3: Will MSI release any newer BIOS for this board? The latest is 07/09/2003, but I think that there are many things to be improved.

Answer 1

Hi again. Maesus, I have already tried that and if I remember well, it had worked in the beginning but later the system started the same thing. I don't want to do that again, because I will have to re-configure all BIOS settings and because I think that it shouldn't be necessary. The solution would be to have a new BIOS release. But I want to add that I have tried with another external AGP card (again a GeForce 2) without result. The system can see only the onboard VGA and I can't figure out why.
Apart from that, I have another VERY STRANGE error. Please read carefully: I was facing many Blue-Screens-of-Death (BSD) with the know error "Page Fault In Non Page Area". From my experience, classic case of RAM problems, due to failing or bad configured DIMM. The RAM is a one-week new 1 GB DIMM DDR-400 which works at 266 MHz (2T CL, 1T CR). I had shared 64 MB to the on-board VGA and the other 960 MB to the system. I couldn't believe that the DIMM was failing, so I used MS Memory Diagnostic tool to check-it out. In the first pass, many errors were found (about 60 at the time I stopped it). This utility is rather old now and in some cases can give wrong results. For example, in my personal system where I have 4 identical DIMMS of 512 MB each (Dual Channel), this utility was reporting some errors, while actually my RAM was perfect. I know it because I have checked it with Memtest86 and was error-free and also because the system is rock-solid. Back to our case now, I re-started the test and again I saw many errors. Actually, the standard 6-tests first pass was ok, but the second pass has... 4500 errors all in the sixth test! Very strange but I was terrified by that! The same day, I tried Memtest86 to verify the errors. Memtest, had correctly recognized the 960 MB of memory and reported that is going to check this amount of memory. 2 passes and no errors. The next day, I have understood that maybe the problem was with the 64 MB shared memory part. Maybe this memory part was causing the whole problems, because the diagnostic tool could try to test it as a system memory part. Additionally I have never used MS Memory Diagnostic on such a case (onboard VGA). I decided to limit the shared memory up to 8 MB and re-try the test, hoping for less errors. I have tried 3 standard 6-tests passes and 3 extended 11-tests passes with not a single error. Also, the BSD have disappeared. Yesterday, I tried to watch a DVD and two times faced BSD. Today, this DVD plays normally. I will continue the tests of course, but I think that there was (maybe still there is) a problem with the hundle of the shared memory part. I have all the latest drivers, but I believe that this board is problematic. Anyway, If someone have to make any comments on this story is welcome.