Ur right there is no on-board video chip for ur MB, I just check the  Asus website, but I was looking for the manual, too bad there is nothing in there, the only thing is a new bios update, that could help, maybe.
Not very good support.
To check ur Graphic Card options go into the BIOS menu (screen),
look around, dont be afraid to touch things, just remember what you change, loook for things related to the AGP port, about that, ur board only work at "4x", everything related to speed can go as far as 4x, make sure, "before u go into all this trouble" check the options over ur Graphic Cards in the Control Panel, everything related to speed should be as higher as 4x not more, 8x is not gonna work, and can make ur system colapse.

About the old card, check this:
Control Panel / Printers and other hardware / System / Hardware / Device Manager

It's gonna show u everything that's in ur system, if somenthing is wrong is going to appear with an i inside a yellow ball, and u can look for anything related to the video adapter.

The last thing u can think, as a final solution is try another MB from another company, I just start to think that the problem is an incompatibility between MB and GC.        

I wasn't talking about the system memory at all dude, I was talking about the ram on the video card itself could be bad. Your video card has 128mb of ddr on the card. If one of the chips is dead/screwed up that can cause a whole array of strange things to happen.

It's not CPU heat related, it may not be GPU heat related (doesn't sound like it to me) so the bottom line is, I'd swap out the part that we think might be the culprit.

BTW whoever said the 9700 is faster than a GeForceFX you're half right... it would be faster if it worked, but it isn't... so I'd rather go a little slower than all ahead dead stop. But as I said earlier, that's only one man's opinion.  

For those not too familiar this might sound difficult.  But it isn't.  Reboot...  hit f8 and go into safe mode.   Go into device manager and look to see what is installed.  You might find what is called a ghost installation of the old graphics card.  Delete it (it will have a yellow exclamation point beside it).  While in Safe mode do a nvidia search and delete all the stuff...  Be sure in Ad-Remove that you actually deleted all the nvidia applications/drivers etc.

You really do need to hit the delete key and go into the bios of the motherboard and see if you are putting any ram into a video cache.

Well, that's it..... good luck.

I just read that installing ATI control panel might solve some problems? This means that change the options there? I have 9500 pro and having some minor problems...so said that it'sbecause XP can change game reso to 60Hz? Even I have 75Hz as my windows? So there is this 1 prog that should fix this problem...."Reinforce....something"

Just leasson that I learned -- my last radeon for sure - had old gf2 mx before + nvidia drivers - no problems.... Catalyst drivers ain't just the same thing than nvidia....might be good in desktop but sux in games...

Holky_Polky, i had the exact same problem with my Alienware system which came with powerstrip installed.  Took me ages to figure out what was wrong - eventually uninstalled powerstrip and voila, SoF2 ran with no more lockups.  Strange but true.

Lock refresh rate? Have to check that 1 out. And I knew it ain't ATI problem - it's XP (and also w2k I have heard).

Thx 4 the tip

I deleted the desktop control panel with my ati 9700 pro.  I use radeonator to o/c and set d3d/open gl.