Just got my 9800XT today...

[CSiborg]

So i decided to rebuild my rig since I game during most of my free time... And you cant beat some of the price drops lately.

Anyhow, I ordered a new ATI 9800XT (retail) from www.gameve.com which was fine. (Despite a short delay shipping it, the price was right and it came intact and working.) So it came today and I decided to toss it in my old box to give it a try before building my new system. No problem right... I uninstall all of the Nvidia stuff, check for the proper AGP driver in windows and reboot the system in VGA mode checking that everything is "defaulted" to normal.

Here is where it gets fun, or not. I pull out my old GF4200, drop in the 9800XT and connect the included power cable. I reconnect everything, fire it up and it goes into VGA mode just fine, but it seems somewhat sluggish loading and overall system performance is down considerably for some reason. So I load the latest (3.9) drivers that I downloaded before swapping the old card out. No problem, it loads, reboot... But wait, the system is slow restarting. No suprise, it is probably processing install commands for the new driver still, but that isnt it. The system starts throwing out delayed write errors and messages about files being corrupt and such. Whoops, thats not good!

I get it shut down the only way it would let me (ie: power off) and check everything out. Restart again, system runs checkdisk as usual, all sorts of file errors now... Joyous! :321: And it does basicly the same thing as before.

Lucky for me, I swap it all back to normal, reboot, run system restore and i'm back to step 1 again. Thank you system restore!

Two things come to mind here... Either the card and the mobo are not compatable together (the old system is a P3 box, the new card may not support the older AGP standard) or the SATA card I have in to run my new drives is causing hardware conflicts which would explain the problems with the lost files. Thoughts?

Lucky for me, I have an Abit IC7-G MaxII, P4 3.0C, Corsair DDR400, a new case and a number of other goodies showing up tomorrow via FedEx. Now if this continues to be an issue with the new setup, i'm just going to have to shoot something... :2guns:

[Drake]

:D:DWELCOME:D:D to Liquid Ninjas, CSiborg!

Well, I see two possibilities... your board, as you said, is not supplying the correct voltages to the card, or you did not completely remove all of the remnants of nVidia's drivers.

[CSiborg]

I suspect the board is at fault. It ran but very sluggish, almost as if I had the hardware speed cranked down to minimum or something along those lines. I'm pretty sure I killed all the Nvidia drivers as I had to reinstall them after going back to the latest backup done yesterday.

[mdzcpa]

What OS are you running? That could certainly br an issue. Sounds like Win98SE?

[CSiborg]

A halfway fresh install of XP Home. I have a pretty nice size order being delivered tomorrow (Friday) including basicly all new internals. The only thing i'll retain from this computer is the CD and CD-R plus my old IDE drive (as a backup) and my new SATA drive which WinXP currently runs from.

[RaNGeR.GaV]

I was almost going to say I was jealous ... until I read about your problems! (sorry, that sounds a bit mean). :)

I'm still waiting on my pre-ordered 9800XT ... its a week late!! I'm hanging out for it sooooo bad!

I hope your new rig sets up ok and you get to enjoy your uber-card to its full extent! :D

[mdzcpa]

I'd go with a fresh install after the new hardware. Sounds like driver/DX issues.

[CSiborg]

Originally posted by RaNGeR.GaV
I was almost going to say I was jealous ... until I read about your problems! (sorry, that sounds a bit mean). :)

I'm still waiting on my pre-ordered 9800XT ... its a week late!! I'm hanging out for it sooooo bad!

I hope your new rig sets up ok and you get to enjoy your uber-card to its full extent! :D

Yea, it almost didnt come when it did... I ordered it last Thursday and the place I ordered it from had it in stock that weekend but it was delayed due to an alternate address on my credit card (which i have on file with the card company). Anyway, by the time they confirmed the address, it was on backorder and they said i'd have to wait. I asked them to send me the Asus version instead and i'd pay the difference (it was like $20 more) but strangely the next day it went out via FedEx and it was the ATI branded retail boxed version I had ordered.

(And for those wondering, it came with a card inside for HL2. The numbers on the card have a coating on them you scratch off similar to a lotto ticket so that people dont buy one and then return it after stealing the code for the game.)

Originally posted by mdzcpa
I'd go with a fresh install after the new hardware. Sounds like driver/DX issues.

Yea, i've backed up whatever data I need to a seperate partition and have up to date drivers ready for basicly everything. I will probably do my startup tests with the old system still and make sure it runs first. After that i'll toss the XP disk in and reformat the drive most likely. I dont have a whole lot of software on the thing yet anyway so no big loss installing things.

[Kill-Switch]

Just thought I'd mention that uninstalling drivers for nVidia cards DOES NOT completely uninstall the drivers. This can cause many problems to the point where a game won't run (if it requires a certain driver set) due to old drivers. The best way to get rid of nVidia drivers is to download Detonator Destroyer, uninstall the drivers and then run Detonator Destroyer ... you'll see a list of the files it removes that you thought weren't there!!

[CSiborg]

Originally posted by Kill-Switch
Just thought I'd mention that uninstalling drivers for nVidia cards DOES NOT completely uninstall the drivers. This can cause many problems to the point where a game won't run (if it requires a certain driver set) due to old drivers. The best way to get rid of nVidia drivers is to download Detonator Destroyer, uninstall the drivers and then run Detonator Destroyer ... you'll see a list of the files it removes that you thought weren't there!!

Yea, I found that is no joke... Lucky for me when I built my new system, I didnt have much to reinstall so I decided to go the full format route instead. No Nvidia drivers in site here....

[RaNGeR.GaV]

w00p!

I got my 9800Xt last night! :D Couldn't wait for the other stuff to arrive so I just got rid of the old nvidia drivers and chucked it in. Cranked everything up to the max, and still get better frame-rates than my old card!! :D (I used the drivers on the CD .. which turned out to be Cat 3.8's).

I tried out that Radclocker program ... but got some nasty results (the speeds it was showing didn't seem right at all). I tried setting it to what the default should be for my card and the screen skitzed out and went to multi-coloured fuzz!! :( I guess it wasn't reading it quite right or something!

And man does this thing run HOT! I'm glad I got rid of its thermal goop and thermal pads and replaced the lot with AS3. I'm totally impressed with the mounting system for the HSF as well. Three screws keeping the whole thing clamped around the card; and a sprung clip applying extra pressure directly on the core (and all easily removable ;) ).

I could really get to like this ATI gear! :)

EDIT: I like the look of this too! (from ATI site (http://mirror.ati.com/products/catalyst/overdrive.html) ).
Q2: How can I find out the frequency that ATI OVERDRIVE™ sets my graphics processor to when enabled?

A2: Users can download any free 3rd party utility to observe the frequency that ATI OVERDRIVE™ sets your graphics processor to. A future CATALYST™ release will update the ATI OVERDRIVE™ control panel so that users can read both the temperature and frequency of the graphics processor.

[Kill-Switch]

Ranger, you need to change your sig now :D

[CSiborg]

I'm using the "Omega" drivers with the overclock program. It proved somewhat flakey at first but I got it working the way i wanted. Mine is set at 435gpu and 393mem and it runs pretty good. I've got so much airflow in my system that I can open the case up and touch the heatsink and it is barely warm to the touch. Either way, i'm probably going to drop some better thermal goop on anyhow... (I keep debating the idea of water cooling the whole box but the cost and mess of it scares me a bit. That and I really dont have a lot of space in this case for a pump, lines, radiator, etc...)

I'm pulling almost 51k points in Aquamark3 (50.64fps) and over 20k in 3DMark01 and over 7050 in 3DMark03 with the system mildly tweaked. I'm impressed finaly...

[RaNGeR.GaV]

What are the Omega drivers CSIborg?

Kill-Switch : Damnit! you're right ... I'll get right on it ;)

[CSiborg]

Originally posted by RaNGeR.GaV
What are the Omega drivers CSIborg?


I didnt save the link but i just did a search for Omega and ATI and I found it pretty easy. They are a "tweaked" driver based on the ATI drivers. Basicly it has overclocking built right in along with some tweaks to make it run somewhat faster. I used a tweaked driver on my GeForce cards before and had significant FPS gains but these didnt prove to be as much of a difference. Needless to say, I tweaked about 5 extra FPS out of the card in Aquamark3 using the drivers and a bit of overclocking.

[Fireblade]

Wotchya all... long time no 'see' :D

@ RaNGeR: The 'Omega' drivers are basically tweaked drivers based on the official ATI driver sets. Get em from Omega Corner (http://www.omegacorner.com/index_ati.html) ;)

[RaNGeR.GaV]

Thanks for the linkage/info. I dunno if I'll try them though ... it does make me wonder that someone on the net can tune up some drivers made by a major video card manufacturer, and somehow make them better. Just adding the overclocking is nice ... but I'm dubious about the rest.