First things first, I'm a professional IT tech since year 2001. Being said that, I never ever had such a difficult time getting this card to work. But when it worked, it just gave life to a pesky horrible ancient Athlon XP system
Let me begin to say I'm using it in a PCChips M810 motherboard. The cheapest Socket 462 motherboard in the history of information technologies (this socket is also known as Socket A). And even in the times of splendor this was already a problematic motherboard. But zillions were sold in South America and Europe and many regions.
So, now its 2014. first problem I've got is my CPU not being recognized properly. No big deal, I will check that later.
I will jump right to the solution because the trial and error was a real nightmare and I don't want to remember.
So, first I'm going to tell everybody how I did make this work, its a PCChips M810, but the method may inspire you to make it work in your system, maybe you also got problematic scenario. Let me try to help you with this.
-Forget windows 7, it just won't install nvidia drivers (at least on this motherboard), I had to give up and use XP (actually I used 2003, an XP derivative server OS) I will investigate this later.
-Install the latest BIOS for the M810.
-Disable in the bios everything you won't ever need. I disabled LPT port, Midi port, Serial port, and Joystick port. Who will need these anyway? I just left USB and USB for DOS enabled. This way, by disabling those port you free up precious IRQ channels.
-Install Windows XP/2003 with everything you need before inserting the GT610 PCI card. Use your onboard SIS video card in the meanwhile, it will be properly recognized by windows XP (while not accelerated at all, at least you can change screen resolution. performance will remain slow)
-Your monitor/display has to be connected into the onboard vga connector. One caveat here, this motherboard won't boot USB. It will also not boot a DVD. So you need to boot a CD. This motherboard doesn't have sata ports so I used a IDE to SATA converter, but it will recognize my 500GB drive as 137GB. So I connected an 80GB drive.
-With the computer off, Insert the GT610 PCI card into a PCI slot (I choose the lowest one)
-boot your system, using the onboard SIS graphics. A new device will be reported by windows. Just cancel the dialog and install Nvidia drivers. One caveat here. I had to use a 2013 XP driver. The newest XP driver (2014) needs .net framework. Also, the newest driver asked me for windows XP with SP3 installed. So the newest XP driver won't install on 2003 server, despite having downloaded everything and having the latests Service Packs for this OS. So I had to use an slightly older driver from 2013.
-Once your video card appears installed, and everything seems fine, you will see both the onboard SIS and the Nvidia GT610 video cards on device manager. This is ok. You have 2 video cards. Still using the SIS as main card.
-Reboot, go to the BIOS of the M810 to tell the motherboard to use the PCI card. Plug and Play section will let you do this. Curiously enough, the M810 has the following stupid bug: When you choose "Main video card: PCI" you are telling to use the onboard VGA, and when you set "Main video card: Onboard VGA" you are telling it to use the PCI one. Its a bug.
-Save changes into the Bios and turn off your computer. Now connect the VGA cable into the GT610
-Turn on the computer and you will see there's video signal comming out from the GT610.
-There it goes, you are ready to go. Unfortunately, I didn't found a good way of disabling the onboard SIS graphics. But they don't bother me, it takes only 8MB of your RAM.
-One thing to notice: go to DXDIAG and enable DirectDraw and Direct3D. As you were using the SIS graphics, these get disabled by not supporting them
-For some reason audio also became disabled. I just enabled it and let the SIS onboard sound chip as main sound device. I won't use the HD audio from the GT610.
For now, this old system works as a charm.
Note, I tried 3Dmark 06.... on Direct X9.0C I've got 1229 points. Not bad considering Windows XP doesn't support several new technologies and also doesn't support Direct X 10 or 11. My CPU test was bad... but it was expected
Youtube videos worked like a charm. Sometimes stutters but on the most part it does't sweat when watching full screen. Have to try HD matroska videos and see how it performs. A lot of work to do yet.
Hope this helped. Overall I'm pretty satisfied that I could make this old system more useful.
| Max Screen Resolution | 2560 x 1600 |
|---|---|
| RAM | 512 MB |
| Memory Speed | 1333 MHz |
| Graphics Coprocessor | Nvidia GeForce |
| Chipset Brand | NVIDIA |
| Graphics Card Ram Size | 512 MB |
