Installed Sapphire HD 3850 AGP and now no games play!

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?

XP SP2
Pentium 4 3.0 GHz
1.0 GB Memory

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.

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

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.

Releasing cards before you support them, bad idea.

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

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????

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.

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 just bought a Sapphire HD 3850 AGP 512 MB card today after hearing it was a good card from a friend. I started looking at the reviews today, and came found a few posts like these. I do not plan on buying a new computer any time soon, so a PCI-e upgrade isn't really an option.

Basically, is it worth the $170 or should I just return it and suck it up with my ATI 9600 256MB? I don't remember the specs for my computer off the top of my head, but I'm at 2GB of PC3200 RAM, a P4 2.0 and Windows XP (not sure which service pack).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

you probably should have gotten a lower card. That P4 can't come close to powering the 3850.

I was referring to the OP, you need to get your own thread, soga.

hay I'm just trying to get help, you don't have to cop an attitued ok.
I don't know everything dude. what is op.

I have a sapphire HD 3850 graphic card and i do have the same problem but some games work with the driver of 8.1 version but call of duty 2 doesnt work it from dark blue to black a few times and then directX detects an unrecoverable arror. I have tried the demo of call of duty 4 and 5 but they doesnt work even. battlefield is playable but sometimes the graphics are wrong. World of warcraft is also playable but the teksts are like chineese. And the battle for middle earth is also play able but with wrong graphics. My computers runs a XP version don't know wich.