Here's my experience with the nForce4, linux,and a single card non-sli rig. I'm pretty sure it's a mobo specific problem, based on everything I've tried. The hardware manufacturers provide their own linux drivers. This is cut and paste from what I've submitted to suse and asus. ATI is upgrading their email (?) so i haven't sent it to them yet. One of them has the answer! It'd be great if someone here did too.
I cannot get my Radeon X700 Pro PCIe card to work properly on the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe motherboard under x windows in 64bit linux. I can get the xserver to find the card and load the fglrx module, but can't get a usable display. My hunch is that there is a problem with the SLI board and/or the ATI drivers. The screen I get looks like only half the work is being done, as if the board is only sending half the instructions to the card. I have tried the board in every permutation of the SLI selector and BIOS settings with no effect. I get the same "half the effort" effect if I run the single card in the 2nd PCIe slot in dual mode (1st slot empty). The desktop is drawn correctly, but I just see a black background and the windows and taskbar are not filled in. Buttons are shown as rectangles of slightly different shade, but not filled in with details like text and shading. If I open a terminal (difficult to do), I can type, but no text appears. Like I said, its as if the card is only drawing half the stuff its supposed to. Things to note: I notice no difference if I run the board with the sli selector completely removed. I also installed winXP temporarily, and have slightly different but still bad problems.
Details of what I've tried follow. [I have included some of my xorg.conf files and the log file from /var/log/Xorg.0.0.log for the best attempt so far. These are all in the attached gzipped tar file.] note: I will send them to anyone who wants since I can't attach files here.
Hardware:
mobo: Asus A8N-SLI deluxe
cpu: AMD Athlon64 / 2GB RAM
video: ATI Radeon X700 Pro PCIe
monitor: Microtek C783 (LCD, works great with Radeon 9000 on a 32bit suse installation)
Operating System:
Installed suse x86_64 9.2 (via http)
x.org 6.8.2, module version = 1.0.2
(Performed standard graphical install with KDE, but had to switch to default runlevel 3 for now)
Ran SaX2 as root. I'm using my Microtek flat panel since I have good config data for it. Can get a "safe" startx execution with the config file xorg.conf.basic (attached). It runs in 640x480 and 4 bit color. It looks terrible, of course. This uses the generic "vga" driver.
Next downloaded the fglrx64_6_8_0-8.10.19-1.x86_64.rpm from ati. Installed and ran the fglrxconfig per the ati.com instructions. The generated xorg.conf (attached as xorg.conf.ati) This one started, but isn't quite right. The mouse cursor, for example, is a 4cm by 4cm block. The KDE tip window and the KDE toolbar both load, but no details (like widget controls, text, taskbar buttons, etc.) are discernable. The KDE tip window is just a white block, with a blue block inside it. The taskbar is just a bunch of multi-color gibberish.
Next attempt was from suse website. Downloaded these files:
fglrx-8.10.19-1.1.x86_64.rpm
km_fglrx-8.10.19-1.1.x86_64.rpm
Installed these 2 packages (first un-installed the straight from ati version above) per the instructions at suse. See:
ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/sup....10.19/README.
This included a kernel rebuild for the new module. SaX2 started with the options suggested, but same problem with lack of detail in the dialog box. The attached "xorg.conf.sax2fglrx" file is what I ended up with after this step. The log file shows that the card is fully and correctly detected. (log attached as Xorg.0.0.log). The xserver loads and gives me a screen as described above (no details filled in, etc.). Of note, the squiggly lines screensaver started and it looks 100% normal. Sometimes the desktop has multi-color lines in one section (top 1/4 or middle 1/4).
Based on this entry in the ATI database (
http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4745.html) I disabled PEG Link Mode in BIOS.
Motherboard setup:
The X700 pro is the only card installed. I have made sure that the SLI connector is installed for single card. I have also tried with it completely removed, as well as in dual mode. No differences are noticed in any setup.
BIOS Issues:
I have updated the mobo bios, trying each successive upgrade (1001.bin, 1002.bin, 1003.bin, 1004.bin, 1005.003.bin). No effect. They did change the config options for PEG Link Mode (you can disable now).
I have installed the rpm for suse 9.2 from chipset_linux.zip.
I have also changed the BIOS "Init Display First" to "PCIEx", and tried various combos of the following settings:
Plug & Play O/S (Yes / No) - no effect
Resources Controled By (Auto/Manual) - no effect
PCI/VGA Palette Snoop - no effect.
Other Things I have tried:
I have also tried to use the open-source "radeon" driver that ships with SuSE. The xserver dies saying that it can't find any devices.
I have used both heads on the card. No effect. (using the ATI DVI-I to VGA adapter shipped with the card).
I have tried with a CRT and with HD out (component video) to an HDTV. No effect.
As an idiot check, I put a PCI allinwonder 128 in, and it looks great. No problems (uses opensource rage driver)
-this narrows it down to the PCIe slots.
I also temporarily installed WindowsXP with the board set up for single PCIe and it worked fine with the default vga driver, much like linux does. After I installed the radeon driver, I started to get an unstable screen, that blinks in and out especially after drawing a new window. This rules out a linux only problem. The desktop and windows are complete in XP though. I'm sure its hardware.
I switched to XFree86 (from xorg) - no difference.
I'm frustrated. I did my research and picked hardware that *should* have worked. I am oh so close to having a (almost) bleeding edge linux htpc in my living room. Any body have any ideas? anandtech.com just came out with a review of SLI boards, and they had some eerily similar video card problems with this board, but from different video manufacturer's.
