Ok. So the video RAM is only fed by the AGP/PCI Bus power supply. That's
what i'll make out from your remark combined with Kano's one. Step by
step, my mental representations is getting closer to how it realy
works... i hope :]
Umm the Additional power cord on the PCI based cards bumps the fed +12v and +5v feeds from (somewhere around) 125ma to somewhere around 300ma. If you don't have this boost, the card doesn't fire at all. Essentially it works or it doesn't -- if its running, your power feed is likely fine.
And my 325w power supply keeps the X1650Pro quite happy, even with 4 hard drives in and teh DVD burner cutting a disk at full bore (12x)
Yes i did ! Or rather, i noted that Windows driver says the card has
512MB RAM, BUT, in the ressources tab, it gives a memory address range
of 0xe0000000-0xefffffff (among other much smaller ranges), which, if
i'm not wrong, translates to a size of 256MB. So there is (at least in
my mind) a missmatch between those two values, Which is a bit similar
(except Windows doesnt crash) to what i get with Linux from Xorg.log :
(II) fglrx(0): Video RAM override, using 393216 kB instead of 524288 kB
(**) fglrx(0): VideoRAM: 262144 kByte, Type: DDR2
and my lspci which gives roughly the same as yours
trims ~ # lspci -vv -s 01:00
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV530LE [Radeon X1600/X1650 PRO] (prog-if 00 [VGA])
Subsystem: Hightech Information System Ltd. Unknown device 216a
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 255 (2000ns min), Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 19
Region 0: Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
Region 2: Memory at fe9e0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Region 4: I/O ports at de00 [size=256]
Expansion ROM at fea00000 [disabled] [size=128K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
Capabilities: [58] AGP version 3.0
Status: RQ=256 Iso- ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA+ ITACoh- GART64- HTrans- 64bit- FW+ AGP3+ Rate=x4,x8
Command: RQ=1 ArqSz=0 Cal=0 SBA+ AGP- GART64- 64bit- FW- Rate=<none>
Capabilities: [80] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Queue=0/0 Enable-
Address: 0000000000000000 Data: 0000
01:00.1 Display controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV530LE [Radeon X1650 PRO] (Secondary)
Subsystem: Hightech Information System Ltd. Unknown device 216b
Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 64 (2000ns min), Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
Region 0: Memory at fe9f0000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Flags: PMEClk- DSI- D1+ D2+ AuxCurrent=0mA PME(D0-,D1-,D2-,D3hot-,D3cold-)
Status: D0 PME-Enable- DSel=0 DScale=0 PME-
So, my understanding is that you have the same problem as i have :] Your
x1650pro's video ram is not detected properly by either the x1650-BIOS,
the main board BIOS, the kernel and/or the fglrx driver... or whatever.
I'd suggest that you are **oversubscribing** your xorg memory allocation. Your card clearly advertises (in the xorg.log snippet) 256Mb of ram. Same as mine. I ***do*** have this card working in xorg, with the current drivers, with DRI == without crashes == but ALSO without AGP bus accelleration. I also have my agp gart set for 128mb right now, but set it to 256mb when I fire up the X1650pro. I set the gart size in xorg.conf to 256mb, and the kernel boot param videomem=256mb -- at that point the card WORKS. Horrendous performance for anything that pushes large amounts of data across the AGP bus, because. ... its running at 33mhz instead of AGP8 ..
I suspect that my two lspci examples are hightlighting an architectural difference between the two lines of video chips.
The 9550 is a ***single*** (vpu/gpu/video engine) that maps all of the 256mb of ram to the one engine. I've read somewhere that after the low end 500 series chips ATI actually changed the way they map memory to the discreet 'heads' since more and more folks were actually using both heads. I've also heard that the 600 series chips have two distinct VPU engines on board, but a) I'm not an engineer, and b) I dont have direct references here. Thus I believe that the X1650Pro showing 256Mb in each unit is quite correct, and that the card does indeed have 512mb on board, just that each 'head/vpu/engine' can only see 256mb ...
What about your power supply ? Does it have enough power for the card ?
As a side note, the lspci output of your 9550 shows 2 regions which
cover the full memory ranges for a total of 512MB. On the other hand,
the mtrr only covers your AGP Aperture and half of the first "region" of
the video RAM. None of the 2nd region. Is it normal ? (no obligation to
answer... just trying to get a better understanding)
I've never seen a power registration issue on my system. Mind you I've never gotten inside the case under load with an ammeter either ...
AGP aperture and video memory are distinctly different creatures.
think thusly
video card is (relative to the CPU) two floors up and down the hall
cpu needs to read and write on video card's memory. Video card needs to read and write to CPU's default memory (system memory)
So -- rather than running the long way around (up the stairs, down the hall and into different room)
(if we had to ask the video card what address on the video card we were to write to each and every time)
we set up a window that we can see each others memory through. Now -- this window does NOT need to be the same size as the memory on either end, but does need to be a fixed size, and we have to have an agreement that determines how it moves around.
agp code will page the window back and forth, and keeps everything neat and tidy. the 'window' in this case is simply an address range that the bios will reserve so that the cpu can write directly to the agp memory -- and thats why you have fixed sizes for the size the window can be (all are power of two and built on 4k), In reverse -- the window allows the video card to write to 'system' memory by writing on its own... and the system can then see this.