My ATI experience

bhanja_Trinanja

Hi,
A few weeks ago, I bought a 7600GT AGP to replace my 9600XT. The 9600XT was my first ATI card and it served me for 2.5+ years. Before that I had a GF 2MX and a GF 4MX 440. So let me narrate by ATI experience. My experience was a unique one and it could prove to be immensely helpful to readers. I faced a lot of issues with this card on 2 different motherboards.

Platform / Motherboard 1:

When I bought and installed the 9600XT, I had the following system:

ATHLON XP PALOMINO 2000+
2 * 256 MB = 512 MB 2.5-3-3-7 DDR333 (Kingston Value RAM)
Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT (GV-R96X128D) BIOS Version: 008.015.058.000
ASUS A7V333 Rev 2.0 BIOS 1014 (VIA KT333 chipset)


My computer had been 100% stable with the NVIDIA 4MX 440. After I installed the 9600XT, I would face the following issues sporadically:

• Occasionally, the keyboard and mouse would stop working at the Windows XP welcome screen. (not a hard lockup as the power button would still work) I would then press the power button once to turn off the system.
• Sometimes, the keyboard and mouse would be undetected at boot causing the ASUS POST reporter to announce (“No Keyboard detected”).
• On occasions, the PC would freeze while rebooting for the first time after a fresh CATALYST install.

(I tried the card on an Intel motherboard and it was rock stable.)


However, my computer was rock stable when running games and I was really impressed with ATI’s image quality.

Major woes struck when I updated the motherboard BIOS from version 1014 to 1017.

With the new bios, I faced the following issues:

• ‘RETURN TO PROXYCON’ of 3DMark 05 would crash with artifacts and an ‘IDirect3DDevice9::Present failed: Device Lost (D3DERR_DEVICELOST)’ error.
• Navigating to CONTROL PANEL->DISPLAY->SETTINGS->ADVANCED would cause the system to hang for a few moments and fill the screen with artifacts.
• After a cold boot, the PC would freeze momentarily on random occasions and display artifacts.

After months of troubleshooting, I fixed the problem by reverting to motherboard bios version 1014.
After that, my system was stable in games once again.

Platform / Motherboard 2:


A few months ago, I decided to upgrade to the AMD64 platform. I bought an AGP motherboard and built my system around the following components:

Athlon 64 3000+ E6 core with SSE3 support
MSI K8N Neo2-FX BIOS 1.C (nforce3 250GB)
1GB dual channel kit Corsair TWINX1024-3200C2 running at 2.5-3-3-8 @ 2.75 V
Gigabyte Radeon 9600XT (GV-R96X128D) BIOS Version: 008.015.058.000
ANTEC Smartpower SL450 450 watt PSU
3 hard drives (2 PATA, 1 SATA)

From day 1, this configuration was a pain in the ass.

I faced numerous issues and my computer was totally unstable.

Summary of problems:

• Setting the AGP Aperture to anything less than 256MB in the bios would lead to texture corruption in all DX9 games. Textures would go missing or get corrupted.
• Half Life 2 and HL2: Lost Coast would freeze with a looping sound irrespective of the AGP aperture.
• Raising the AGP Aperture to 256MB / 512 MB would fix the texture corruption in 3DMark 06 but not in Call of Duty 2. I would see missing textures in Call of Duty 2 and get an error “Create2DTexture failed: Ran out of memory”.

I tried every tweak out there to fix this, but in vain. (Drivers, AGP voltage, memory voltage, fast writes on/off, sideband addressing on/off, AGP 8X/4X toggling etc…)



Finally, I trashed the 9600XT in favor of a new XFX 7600GT AGP. All my problems vanished instantly!

Investigating further, I tested the Radeon on an Intel chipset motherboard and it worked flawlessly as before.

I urge ATI to figure out what plagues ATI cards on certain motherboards.

GutterPunk

nvidia nforce chipsets ftlose imo I could turn this into a nice rant, but sometimes companies just aren't fair . I was messing w/ a 7800gt on a nforce 2 chipset, and we put in a 9800xt (Full computer reformat), and it gave us troubles, while the 7800gt would flawlessly. The 9800xt worked @ 100% on an intel chipset, and same w/ the 7800gt. After about 1 week of struggle, the nforce 2 accepted the 9800xt but with poor results at times.

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CompressorX

I had 2 Asus ATI Radeon's 9600XT on two same machines and one of them died after one year but the other one still works great to this day. For the one that died it was similar to this :



But i gave it back and payed some money for x700pro and had no problems with it for a year than i gave it back and added some money for my present x1800GTO and it works more than exelent.
Those problem with ATI cards do happen but rarely and nVidia isnt all that great my friend has a 6600GT (or should i say had) and he is having the same problems as i did with 9600XT and his card was only 2 months old.
My chipset was nForce3 while i had that 9600XT and the same everithing on X700pro.
Now iv got nForce4 and it works great with x1800.
My friend (that i was talking about earlyer) has an nF4 chipset
So he's geting a new card (no charge) but my point is that all manufacturers have their good and bad its just a matter of wich one comes to your hands.

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Judas

Corruption like that sometimes is caused by Memory issues (physical memory) or onboard graphics memory....

But yeah, be careful with bios updates, they can have issues.

And being an AGP card, there has been issues with the 9600xt with specific AGP settings.

I haven't had any issues with PCI-EX16 cards in an nforce enviroment But i had nothing but complete issues with the nforce 2 boards and ATI cards, but even with an nvidia card, ocasionally wierd things would happen.

I blamed the board. As the cards and everything was rock solid in via/intel/sis motherboards.

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The_Neon_Cowboy

motherboard related issues?, wich aren't the responceabilty of the graphics card maker!
To adress, mainly the main board manufaturer or the chipset maker need to update thier
firmware. Or other system issues could be to blame. BTW AGP is not anyones magor
consern I assume since it's a dieing breed anyways...

In about 19 years of dealing with pc's , X? years professsionally...
I've only personally experianced one! That was with a
cheapie $30 mobo, that had issues with ati cards. Again, that case
not the chipset burt the mobo makes lack of bios support that created the issue.

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Cannyone

I feel that this poll is rather lopsided. It's almost as if we are given the choices of "ATI sucks" and "ATI SUCKs bull nads... through a 20ft. garden hose".

I built two systems with ATI XT1900 cards and I have none of the issues you describe. Yes, I do have cases where shadowing doesn't work right in some games. But it's not like Nvidia graphics card drivers are "perfect" by any stretch of the imagination.

I moved to ATI chipset motherboards and ATI graphics cards this year, after 4 years of never personally owning an ATI anything. The reason is simple: I was sick and tired of Nvidia NEVER finishing their chipset drivers. At the same time I knew, for a fact, that Nvidia builds their video drivers so that there will be incompatibilities with 'non-Nvidia' chipsets. Now I don't know if there is something similar with their later chipset drivers, but it wouldn't suprise me in the least.

This is part of the industry now days! These companies are convinced that they can't compete on a "level playing field". So they are pulling out all the stops to sabotage anyone who wants to pick and choose between brands.

Of course there are other possibilities that might be the actual cause of the issues you are experiencing. But I seem to remember that one of the motherboards you mention was using a NF3-250Gb chipset. And I have extensive experience in that area, with boards from 6 different manufacturers (those were Asus, DFI, Epox, MSI, Soltek, and Shuttle). In every case I had a long sad litany of stupid issues, and abortive attempts to resolve them. I eventually concluded that the NF3 itself was like a redheaded step child. Yet I still heard about problems with SLi chipsets and X-Fi sound cards, so I knew that the cause was really more basic than an outdated product line.

Simply put, these companies have to cut costs somewhere. They certainly aren't going to cut down on graphics card development, so the bottom of the totem poll seems to be chipset drivers. And don't think companies like Asus, or MSI, are going to spend a ton of money to develop a decent BIOS for that "out of date" motherboard either. The end result is that after 10 years of being a computer tech, I'm sick and tired of the BS.

I'm gonna find another job!!

biguglyman

System in sig is nforce2 chipset? Anyway, great graphics from 9800pro ati card. Only problem was cooling fan went south after 2+ years so I replaced it with an aftermarket cooler. No problems. I also use Omega drivers.

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Dyre Straits

I will echo some of Cannyone's sentiments. I feel the poll is too biased to vote and/or reply. But, wanted to at least let Cannyone know he's not alone.

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H3X4D3C1M4L

I've experienced issues but it was only with the WDM/AiW side of my card, other than that the 3D part has worked flawlessly (within reason) for me.