I just replaced my old Radeon 9800XT Pro video card with a Radeon (Sapphire) HD 3850 512 MB AGP card so I could play Bioshock and other new games. I removed the newer ATI Catalyst control center and installed the one that came with the new video card as well as the new driver. Now when I boot up after the Windows splash screen but before I see the desktop my screen flashes from black to grey a few times then finally loads the desktop. If I try to play Bioshock I get a windows error screen that says Bioshock.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.  We are sorry for the inconvenience. When I try my Half Life 2 game it just wont open and throws me back to the desktop. When I try Call Of Duty 4 it says something like DirectX encountered an unrecoverable error and throws me out. I've uninstalled and reinstalled newer drivers from both ATI And Sapphire with no luck. Also when I'm on web pages (Like this one) I can't scroll down smoothly anymore the screen kind of jumps down refreshing itself as I scroll. Any ideas?
 
 
 

Are you on XP or Vista?

XP SP2
Pentium 4 3.0 GHz
1.0 GB Memory

Sounds like a driver problem.  
Uninstall ANYTHING ATI, then install this:
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_ [...] radeonx-xp
 
I'm not too clued up about the 3850 on AGP, but should work none the less.

Yes. That's one of the ones I tried with no luck. I also tried a newer one from Sapphire that said it was specifically for the AGP version but that did not help either.

what kind of power supply do you have? whats on the +12v rail?

Try going into Catalyst control centre and check all the settings for allow the application to control.

 
I have a 3.2 Northwood on an Intel 865 PERL motherboard and it works great.  I've tried both the drivers and CCC that came on the disk and the drivers on the web site at:
 
http://www.sapphiretech.com/us/support/drivers.php
 
Either work on my system running XP Pro SP2.
 
You may want to look at your power supply - to have a reliable system with these cards, I would recommend at least a name brand PS of at least 450 watts with at least 30 amps on the 12 Volt rail, the higher the better.  What brand of PS do you have and what are is its outputs, total and 12V?

I read that ATI haven't even got driver support for the AGP HD3850 yet, powercolor had to modify some catalyst drivers to get it to work.

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AFAIK, 3850 support in the AGP form is not yet completed. You gonna have to wait for the Catalyst 8.3 version.
 
Peace

Releasing cards before you support them, bad idea.

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Shouldve bought nVidia

 
 
Yeah, ouch.  What is your AGP aperture settings in bios?  What are your PSU specs?  

oh you might just be screwed by sapphire and ATi. I bought the agp HD2600XT from sapphire last November and still haven't got it to run properly. First the driver support for ATis agp cards are slim and none. Second you've got to check if your motherboard supports the newer cards. Mine didn't so I got screwed. I can't return my card to the store because it has been too long since I bought it. So update your motherboard bios asap and do a clean install of windows with the new drivers. If it won't work then just return the card and get yourself a older card. DON'T ever listen to ATi when they say "it will be fixed with the next drivers" because they won't!
Sapphire support board doesn't help much either with an arrogant bastard replying to in the support threads telling people that it's their own fault not sapphires. All the threads will eventually end up with "file a complain to ATi".

Since ATi were taken over by AMD, everything always seems to made to sound groundbreaking, but rarely ever is.
 
Look at the Phenom's for a start, I remember a 10 minute long video released by AMD bragging about how much better their True Quad Core architecture was over the Intel design, and how much better the performance  would be over Intel's etc etc.  
 
Then when it's released, their highest spec Quad Core part cant compete with Intel's lowest end Quad core.  
 
AMD say's.... We're working on it
 
Sound much like ATI????

Well part of the issue is that ATI doesn't actually make the AGP cards.  All these other companies are using their chipsets and making them AGP.  Not to say it wouldn't be nice if ATI supported all their cards (even 3rd party ones).  BUt, it is the responsibilty of the card mfg to make sure there are drivers that work with it.  
 
What was the last AGP card that ATI actually produced... I think it was a varient of the x1600.

Hooooooly Cow people. Before I burnt good money on 3800 series AGP video card, I'd really, really think about biting the bullet and just doing a platform upgrade.

Try Omega drivers, they are rumored to work with the AGP versions of the 3800 series.

 
This is true.  But, the 3850 cards could be a good final step for the many higher end Pentium and AMD x2's (skt939) that have an AGP slot.
 
But, if you have a low end CPU (like older P4s, lowend AMD 939/754 or Athlon XPs), this could be a waste of money.  These low end CPUs just can't feed a card like this enough data to make use of it's speed.  Your CPU would be a bottleneck and would hinder any sort of gains you would expect to see.
 
Everyone on AGP does need to consider finally making the jump to PCI-e.  I just did it and I will say that I am extremly pleased that I finally did it.  It didn't cost me an arm and a leg, either.  I reused a lot of my components in my PC (HDs, DVD, case, PSU) and was able to jump to a decent system for under $300.
 
Athlon x2 4000+ (that I was able to OC to about 2500 mhz)
2 Gig DDR2800 Corsair XMS2
A nice ECS mobo that has proven to be really stable.
XFX 8600 GT XXX (that also OC's very nicely)

I'll second a hearing of that rumour.

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