I bought the Powercolor(Who for the record have horrid/non-existent tech support.) version for an older 939 machine I've got and I can't get the card to work for the life of me.
I've read of a lot of people having driver issues with them under Catalyst 8.3. So I've tried every version back to 7.7 as well as the ones on the install disk to no avail. I changed out the power supply for a 750 watt PC Power & Cooling from another machine to see if that was the problem, but it didn't have any effect. I've tried monkeying with every bios setting I can think of. The only thing I've not done that I can think might help is to completely format and try the card under a clean install, but I'd like to avoid that if possible.
Normally I would just wait a few weeks for a new driver, but the errors and crashes I'm getting make me think the actual card may be bad as well and I'd like to RMA it sooner rather than later if I need to.
Here are the machine specs. I didn't see any posts about known hardware incompatibilities involving any of this equipment.
Asus A8V Deluxe(Newest Bios Revision and I reset all of the overclocks to default)
Athlon 4200+ X2
2gigs Kingston HyperX PC3200 RAM
74gb Raptor
Sound Blaster XiFi Xtreme Gamer
Lite On IDE DVD-RW CD-RW combo drive
Ultra X2 550 Watt PSU
Windows XP Professional 32 Bit
So here is what happens. The board POSTs just fine with the card installed. The drivers from Catalyst 8.1 and up seem to install just fine. However, when I restart for the first time it blue screens on a memory error. After restarting it another 1-3 times the machine typically makes it to the windows login screen. From here it hangs about 50% of the time becoming totally unresponsive. The rest of the time it will load the windows desktop normally.
I get lots of blue screens and severe artifacting every time the card attempts to do anything in 3D. This is usually followed by another system freeze. If it doesn't freeze the whole screen artifacts into a big mess of colors and never seems to recover.
If I enter the Catalyst Control Center it shows everything as normal except it will never keep the AGP Read or Write settings enabled when I set them. They test fine when I use the retest button, but after rebooting they are set back to Off.
I also occasionally get other weird errors. I've had the low disk warning pop up a few times and tell me that I've got less than 200mb of hard disk space free with that card installed. When I looked at the properties of the hard drive in my computer it said I had 1.5gb used and 69.2gb free. The actual numbers were something like 50gb used and 20gb free with a functional video card installed.
So does anyone have any ideas on something else I should try or can anyone outline what they have done to get their card to work properly?
Bad card...
Makes you laugh really... ATi has the total monopoly on the modern AGP card market and they still cant do it right
Well, before we start pointing fingers, ATI doesn't actually produce any AGP cards. They stopped with the x1600, I think. These are 3rd party companies that take ATI's chipsets and do whatever they want with them.
To the OP, this sounds like a bad card. RMA it and get another one.
As to who is at fault here. No doubt the majority of the fault lies with the 3rd party companies, but I can't help but blame ATI more than a little. If you are going to let someone stamp your logo all over their product you'd be wise to support it as it is your name that gets tarnished.
As to who is at fault here. No doubt the majority of the fault lies with the 3rd party companies, but I can't help but blame ATI more than a little. If you are going to let someone stamp your logo all over their product you'd be wise to support it as it is your name that gets tarnished.
While yes, you would think there would be more emphasis on ATIs part in making sure stuff using their chips worked good. But, it really isn't their intention to ever do anything AGP related anymore. They dropped that awhile ago. These 3rd party companies, like Powercolor and Sapphire are taking chipsets intended for PCI-e, adding a bridge chip and making it run AGP. A lot of times, they even use different ram chips, and depending on the company, they are usually crap compared to what ATI would use. The fault and blame falls on them if there is a problem. Powercolor is one of those brands I have always steered away from, as I have always heard bad things.
In your case, though, I bet it is just a bad card... nothing to do with the fact that it AGP.
If I pull the card out and put the old one back in memtest, scandisk, and the WD hdd utility all check out fine and the system runs flawlessly. With the new card in it all goes to crap.
Memtest can't even address all the available memory with the new card installed. Which seems strange to me as I didn't realize that system memory was affected by your video card aside from the AGP aperture or whatever it is that claims a little chunk to talk to the card. I didn't try the HDD utilities with the new card in as I'm guessing the memory error is what is causing the HDD confusion.
@OP:
I have a similiar setup to you (A8V Deluxe but w/FX-60 - rest of specs under my config) that I just put
a Sapphire 3850 512MB AGP card into.
I took the stock cooler off and stuck on an Accelro S1 rev.2 with two 100 Silent Scythe Fans.
I used the drivers on the disk that came with the card - figured I'd start with them.
So far it seems to work fine. With everything at stock settings I'm pulling just over 9K in 3dmark06 vs.
around 5K with my old x1950 Pro. And it runs really cool - idle at 25C, load hasn't gone over 35C!
I'm looking forward to overclocking the card and cpu and seeing what i can get out of this old rig.
So no complaints from me - ATI/Sapphire did a decent job in my opinion (with the exception maybe of the
stock cooler that Sapphire put on - which I new would need to be replaced).
I agree with some of the other posters - you've either got a bad card or possibly bad memory.
My only complaint/question: Is there a utility that recognizes the card and will allow me to tweak it?
I was using ATI Tool but it doesn't seem to recognize the card - using CCC right now but thats not nearly as
nice at ATI Tool was.
ati card drivers have a problem with the fast write setting, and there is a fix for it, this is why i use omega drivers, they have the fast write fix with the driver. i have the x1650pro and had a few problems at the start but i work with computers for a liven, so ive submitted some fixes for ati installations. 1st of all this is what i would recommend:
1. reinstall the previous graphics card and start the system, or onboard vga, the system needs to boot to os.
2. go to add/remove programs and unistall .NET frameworks past 1.1hotfix ( 2.0,3.0and 3.5).
3. install .NET framework 2.0. using microsoft update site.
4. uninstall all the nvidia drivers, then turn off rig.
First time on this site i hope i am posting in the right spot
I bought a sapphire 3850 agp 512 ddr3 installed it with default everything on the cd that came with it took along time but eventually it finished rebooted and seemed to detect it fine since the first test i use it to move a window around and there was no lag and it was showing as ati radeon 3850 in display properties but ati tool or ati tray tools or any games would not detect it right ati tray tool would show the 3d window and show 1280 frames per second with it open and a bench of ati tool would give me 15800 way past the next card to compare it to which was a x1900xtx so its doing something but when i look at the clocks it says default clocks 600 and 829 or whatever the right ones are for this card i checked they were right but actual clocks were a whopping 13.50 and 13.50 or 13.50 and 27 ddr odd also age of empires would load and play music but the screen would freeze without even beginning to show people walking around but the music would play and i could shutdown properly using the power button with one touch it would play the music and shut down now though after installing and removing and reinstalling trying all these things people have tried on here i just get a blue screen once i think it is finally working or i can have it work half way like i described before
i have tried my thermaltake 680 watt pure power power supply with it no go so i took it out
it is in a dell optiplex gx270 with 2 gigs ram (2x1) and a pentium 4 800mhz fsb 3.0 512 kb cache cpu with HT and the stock power supply since it dont seems to make a difference also i have tried it in a gigabyte ga 7vax with agp 8x and adjustable agp voltage no go there either both systems work fine with a x800xl and a 7600gt also the little error light on the video card never comes on and the card just gets nice and warm not cool not hot kinda the same as my x1800xt does can anyone help? is this a dead card?
