I will never buy another ATI product. ATI sucks. The new ATI Radeons suck. The drivers don’t work for [-peep-] on win2k. Driver updates are non-existent as in the past. They have no toll free tech support. Their new Radeon cards ship with win2k drivers, which don’t work properly. If you want to feel [-peep-] on buy Radeon.
Asus CUSL2
P3 700
296MB SDRAM PC133 Cas2
SBLive Platinum 5.1
I wish I still had a copy of the long and detailed report I typed out to them concerning problems with their card. In the phone calls to them (which the customer pays for) they could not help me but were interested in my errors as some had already been reported and some were new to them and some helped them figure out more in detail why certain errors would occur. They encouraged a detailed write up. I did them a favor at my own expense and time and then they replied with we will only fix problems reported to a significant degree… Only if customers complain enough will they bother fixing problem. What a joke. In other words they know of problems but are not fixing them until their customers really start complaining in droves.
Under win2k these are the problems I encountered. All games using Glide of which I probably own 40 have graphics that look like [-peep-]. Direct3d, which works on some games, looks like crap on some and good on others. TV looks good but the downloading of the TV schedule fails half the time. TV out controls for turning TV on and off do not work at all. When you plug in your Svideo your automatically outputting your pc signal to your TV and cannot switch it on and off like you’re supposed to be able to on your pc. Furthermore once you view your pc on you TV your graphics no longer fit your pc monitor screen and you end up using your mouse to scroll to areas on the peripheral of your pc monitor you can see unless you scroll there. This problem is terrible since you cannot use the controls that come with the card to switch back to using the monitor as the screen properly. What happens is you get stuck with this scrolling problem and it doesn’t go away even when you reboot. The only way I found to fix it is to completely uninstall the drivers and then reinstall them and set the monitor resolution low to like 640x480 and then reset it back up to whatever you want. This is very time consuming process. ATI never even replied to this particular problem. DVD playback, which is hardware driven stutters! Mpeg4 playback fails! This card is a nightmare folks! I have forgotten half of what I wrote them detailing errors received and better descriptions of the problems but this should be enough to explain what a piece of crap this card is. After spending about four hours total on the phone with them and getting them all the information they wanted I get no reassurances. All I get is hopefully we will have an answer to some of these problems in the future. Blah Blah Blah. Month goes by and nothing. Many people have posted on Tomshardware as to the untrustworthy nature of ATI concerning drivers and their inability to act quickly to fix driver problems. How can you purchase a card that ships with Win2k drivers today and have it not work in everything properly accept TV in? When it takes half a year to fix all the problems on such a product why bother buying it since by that time the card will be selling for less than half what you paid for it and will be half as fast as newer cards on the market. ATI is going the way of the Dodos if they continue with this irresponsible behavior.
An email I sent ATI in response to a customer support reply that was more useless than the long distance phone support.
Thank you very much for you're very kind reply... I find the information I have provided your company with at my expense much more valuable to you than the information you have provided me. Reiteration of solutions I have already tried does neither of us any good. I have returned both cards to the original retailer. In the future please refrain from releasing unfinished products. I and other customers regard such actions as unlawful. I can no longer recommend your products due to poor driver performance under win2k (I have not tested any other OS nor do I wish to do so as your product ships with supposed perfect win2k drivers), which I have tested extensively. The long list of problems with your drivers is tiresome. DVD play, which I previously thought, worked perfectly stutters randomly. In the future please don't rely on your customer base to solve your problems for you because in the end you lose valuable promotional commentary along with a good customer. No need to reply I just thought you should know how thoroughly disgusted I am with your product and your company.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram