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General discussion

ATI problemo

Mar 1, 2005 8:32AM PST

hi all,

ok, i bought an ati sapphire radeon 9250 TD 128MB. I have an abit K7 mobo. 128mb ram, 800mH AMD athlon using WinXP pro. i used to have an nVidia 64mb Riva TNT2 64/64Pro and everything worked fine, so long as the games were old. ask me for any other specs.

ok, ive turned off and deleted drivers of the previous hardware acceleration, put in the new card correctly. booted on a clean install of windows, run the installer, using catalyst 5.2 or whatever is latest software interface and drivers, but as soon as the drivers are loaded the screen turns black with blinking underscore in the top left hand corner. so later i run in diagnostic mode, turn off accelaration, and the problem goes away, so i can get a basic display but i cant use acceleration. Also, when running without acceleration Catalyst errors and cannot start with mention about there not being a ATI card present or its working drivers

i would really like to start playing games at my friends pace, is there anyone who can help?

Discussion is locked

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LOL
Mar 1, 2005 8:52AM PST

well have tried youir method and found the same results. Give this a try right click on the desktop, and then click properties. This should bring up display properties, and from there you need to need to click on the settings tab. Now in the setting folder look for and click on the advance tab. Once this opens a new window, look for adaptor tab, and click it. Now you will need to look for some thing listed as the display adaptor and there should be a properties button for said. click on this and look for drivers tab, When you find this look for update driver click there and point it in the direction of your drivers. Let us know if htis helps. Happy

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reply
Mar 2, 2005 6:00AM PST

well, the only time i can reach that area is if there are no drivers other than the basic VGA. if the driver for the card and the card itself are installed and detected at boot the screen goes black etc

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Driver question
Mar 1, 2005 10:37AM PST

Since your card is from an ATI "partner" and not ATI, did you get your drivers from Sapphire? If not, get the equivalent from their site.

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bump
Mar 2, 2005 6:19AM PST

john in the next message answers this question. i concur due to having already looked at the sapphire site, the cards uses the same software, Catalyst 5.2

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128 Megs?
Mar 1, 2005 1:51PM PST

First off your new card will run the catalyst drivers found on ATI's website. All their partner cards use standard ATI drivers.

Did you say you were running WinXP pro and trying to play games on 128 megs of ram? If so then I think we've found your problem. WinXP home and pro both use around 128 megs sitting still doing nothing at all and you are trying to play a game on top of that. Yes I know Gateway, Dell and all the other cookie cutter computer retailers will sell a PC with XP and 128 megs but ask any gamer what happens and you'll soon find that it's simply not enough. Video cards can render over 120 frames per second these days and you didn't think that all that was happening on the video cards 128 or 256 meg memory did you? Part of that action is happening in your system memory. Heck a gig of corsair XMS extreme low latency memory (2.2.2.5) with activity LED's is only around 270 bucks these days so live a little and shell out a couple dollars. I'd lay money on it that your problems will disapear and your games will be better than ever. You'll also free up that new video card's memory so it can render to it's heart's content. You will most certainly notice that your lag suddenly diminishes or goes away. Even if you don't want to spend that much money I'm sure you can break open a piggy bank and get at least a 256Mb chip.

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dang
Mar 2, 2005 6:08AM PST

thanks. i didnt want to have to spend anymore. but this seems the most likely cause. ill go shopping soon enough.