New HD - 3D app probs

I'm having trouble with a few 3D applications on my new hard drive. Tribes2 and MoHAA work fine, but when I try to run either BF1942 or 3DMark2001SE, upon entering the actual 3D portion (the game and the 3DMark themselves load), the app either freezes, quits, gives a windows error, or reboots my machine.

Specs:
Athlon T-Bird 1.4GHz (no oc)
Abit KT7A-Raid mobo (bios 64)
512MB Crucial pc133 cas2 @133MHz
80GB Maxtor Ultra ATA133 8MB buffer HD
GForce2 PRO 64MB (no oc)
W2k PRO sp3 (NTFS)
4.45 Hyperion Via 4in1's
41.03 Det drivers
DX8.1

Any ideas what the problem is?

recently change anything? how many sticks of memory are in there?

this is a brand new hard drive (my IBM Deskstar crashed), so it's a new OS install, drivers, etc.

3 sticks of RAM (unchanged), 2 x 128MB, 1 x 256MB, all cas2 from crucial.

just a wild shot though, yank one of the sticks out. yes, i'm serious. i have a KT7 motherboard here (similar architecture, same BIOS) and it refused to run with 2x128 + 1x256MB and displayed exactly the same symptoms as yours did.

yes invar i know how finicky these boards are when it comes to memory. mine won't even start windows with the 1x256 in there by itself.

anyway, i tried it w/o one of the 128mb sticks, still no go. tried it w/o both 128mb sticks, no windows, as i said. i guess i could try it w/o the 1x256 but i find it absurd that i have to go through this to get a game to work.

thanks for the help anyway.

hmm...bios update maybe? there's an a9 bios out I believe, at least there's an a9 for the kt7. should be the same for you.

i seem to be having more probs than i knew of with 3d apps. tribes2 crashed and locked on me in a scrim tonight. i'm also getting ingame momentary freezing. seems to me like an agp issue. right now im using a 256mb aperature at 4x agp.

i also have a slew of agp hotfixes but im not sure which to apply. any ideas?

edit: as for the bios update suggestion, here's what's new since v64:

BIOS File Description
kt7a9.exe Fix nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4x00 AGP card compatible issue with Windows XP.
HPT 37x BIOS version 1.11.0402.
BIOS Compile Date: 7/11/2002.

kt77n.exe Support up to 137GB HDD and above.
HPT 370 RAID BIOS version 1.11.0402.
BIOS Compile Date: 01/31/2002.

kt764.exe Fine tune the register value of CPU driving strength to enhance the system stability.
HPT 370 RAID BIOS version 1.11.0402.
BIOS compile date: 11/07/2001.

I don't really see anything there that looks like it would help.

well honestly, it won't hurt to flash it as long as you follow the procedure. i flashed my bios about 15 times in one day while testing different versions.

and fyi, they don't include a lot of things they changed in the bios versions in the readme. i found that out that same day. :)

well i seem to have fixed it - or at least bf1942 is working now.

a suggestion was made to me at icrontic that the 4.40 and up via 4in1's are problematic. i was using 4.43, then 4.45. i went back to 4.37 and it works. :)

ah icrontic, good forum. :)