Graphics Card from Hell! PLEASE HELP!

Silasa

Silasa

Silasa

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Joined
26 Feb 2009
Posts
14
Hey all,
I recently purchased a "ATI PowerColour X1650 Pro" AGP graphics card to replace a Nvidia Geforce 5200 FX card.
And so far i have had no end of troubles.
The old geforce did about max 25 FPS on Wow with all settings set to Minium settings.

On the other hand the ATI does nothing. After installing the card, everything seemed fine, after starting up Wow, the main page appeared sharper, brighter and the snow fall effect was much faster and completely unchoppy.
All was well.

Until i actually logged in. I was able to get a few seconds of walking around, with lights flashing around the screen and other strange graphical errors, after a few seconds the entire screen goes black, i can still here the sound effects of the game as i move around so the PC hasent shut down, but i am still unable to do anything.
Upon restarting the PC i get a "The System has recovered from a serious error" message. This has happened time and time again and i have looked around and done everything under the sun to get rid of this:
Uninstalling/Reinstalling Driver
Making sure old drivers are uninstalled
Uninstalling/Reinstalling Card
Getting rid of the Catalyst Manager
Using the Omega Drivers

None of this has worked and everytime i log in it just dies. I have tryed running games such as Mount&Blade and Farcry and both of these have the same effect.
The actual running of the PC is completely fine, there are no graphical or colour glitches what so ever.
I really carnt understand what is wrong, i have just conclude that ATI are abit rubbish compared to nVidia.

Looking around forums i can see that some people have the same problem as me yet others are reporting getting 50-60 FPS.
I have also noticed that during the few mintues i have been able to play my games, FPS has been very low and the Geforce 5200 seems to be out performing it, which i just carnt understand.

I really dont know what to do and would appreciate any help, i think now it might be down to the BIOS, but i will post my system information below:

CPU:AMD Sempron, 1600 MHz (8 x 200) 2800+
Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R (MS-6702) (5 PCI, 1 AGP, 3 DDR DIMM, Audio, Gigabit LAN, IEEE-1394)

Motherboard: ChipsetVIA VT8383 Apollo K8T800, AMD Hammer
BIOS Type: AMI (03/04/05)
Bios Version: 07.00T
Video Adapter: Radeon X1650 Series Secondary (512 MB)
Video Adapter: Radeon X1650 Series (512 MB)
3D Accelerator: ATI Radeon X1650 (RV535)
Monitor: SyncMaster 2023NW [NoDB] (9CQ857169J)


The Card:
[ AGP 8x: ATI Radeon X1650 ]

Graphics Processor Properties:
Video Adapter ATI Radeon X1650
BIOS Version 009.013.001.027.024647
BIOS Date 04/27/09 06:04
GPU Code Name RV535
Part Number 113-AAXXXXXX-2009
PCI Device 1002-71C7 / 1787-2227 (Rev 9E)
Transistors 157 million
Process Technology 80 nm
Die Size 131 mm2
Bus Type AGP 8x @ 8x
Memory Size 512 MB
GPU Clock 594 MHz (original: 600 MHz)
RAMDAC Clock 400 MHz
Pixel Pipelines 12
TMU Per Pipeline 1
Vertex Shaders 5 (v3.0)
Pixel Shaders 12 (v3.0)
DirectX Hardware Support DirectX v9.0c
Pixel Fillrate 7128 MPixel/s




Another thing id like to add is a quote from a review of the card at play.com:
"After a bit of tweaking in the BIOS I found that if the AGP aperture is set to anything higher than 128MB, the card will refuse to work correctly.

Once I changed that down to the min of 8MB (why have aperture when you have 512 graphics at ur fingertips?!) the PC worked, and the card installed, and now it's running games and apps beautifully.
It runs SWAT4 in full detail with no jumps or anything, something I thought I'd never see!"

I have basic knowledge of a computer and its part and am able to easily install compenents, but i dont know much about the BIOS and dont think it very wise that i should go messing around with it before i know what im doing.

Once again, thanks for any help in advance and sorry for the lengthy text :P
 
Is that really the only option?
I thought id be able to access the BIOS on my PC and tinker with it, but conviently i carnt access it and im getting a "BIOS not Installed Message" before Windows boots up :S
 
If you still have your motherboard manual it should tell you how to get into the BIOS and change the AGP aperture, I would give it a try atleast before RMAing the board if someone else did that to fix the problem. If not then RMA it.

Also do you have the latest patch for WOW?

Hawker
 
Sounds like your PSU isn't up to it. Does the AGP version have to be plugged into the the PSU?
 
mame said:
Sounds like your PSU isn't up to it. Does the AGP version have to be plugged into the the PSU?
Click to expand...

I wouldn't have thought so. Since the connectors that go into GFX cards are called PCI-E power connectors.
 
JoeH said:
I wouldn't have thought so. Since the connectors that go into GFX cards are called PCI-E power connectors.
Click to expand...


You can and do have molex and PCI-E connectors that go into graphics cards. Even if you had a PSU with PCI-E connectors on, it isn't hard to connect these to an AGP graphics card. Cards that came out in both AGP and PCI-E such as this one are more likely to need extra/more power for the AGP version. My x1950pro AGP needed 2 additional power connectors to work. My 7600GT AGP needed 1 plugged in whereas the PCI-E version needed none
 
Well sounds like you have tried quite a lot of things. Before you spend more time on it, have you got access to another PC with an AGP port?
 
Sadly, i dont.
I have just set the AGP aperture to the minium of 8MB like the user on play.com and im just going to try and see if Wow Runs.

If not then im pretty much fed up of this card and ill RMA like you originally recommended :P
 
mame said:
You can and do have molex and PCI-E connectors that go into graphics cards. Even if you had a PSU with PCI-E connectors on, it isn't hard to connect these to an AGP graphics card. Cards that came out in both AGP and PCI-E such as this one are more likely to need extra/more power for the AGP version. My x1950pro AGP needed 2 additional power connectors to work. My 7600GT AGP needed 1 plugged in whereas the PCI-E version needed none
Click to expand...

Ahh fair enough, thanks for that info :)
 
After changing the AGP aperature to 8mb, my system decided to disable AGP :( So i changed it up to 32MB, rebooted and all seemed well was running a lot smoother.
Booted Wow.
And the problem persists....
Theres really nothing else i can think of to do, think ill just return it tbh, its been a complete waste of time and money :S
 
A guy at work had the same symptoms with an AGP 1650, after replacing a dead (so he said) Nvidia 6600GT in his son's machine.

I tested the card in an old agp board. Nothing wrong with it.

Back in the AGP days I remember being religious about Nvidia driver removal when swapping to an ATI card. You used to have to make serious efforts via safe mode, and so on, to clear drivers out.
 
one thing, my mate got errors on his when he first got it if it was set to 8x agp instead of 4x, even though his board was 8x and so was the card, and the board owrked with another card fine, and the card worked in another board fine
 
its possible its your VIA mobo that is causing the trouble.Have you updated your mobo driver.I also got the x1650 agp card b4 i upgraded to pcie and it is a very decent graphics card but my mobo chipset is Nforce 2/3.Try the Hyperion Pro drivers here if your not using it yet.The only way to test it is to try it on other mobo that has an intel/nforce chipset as suggested here already by others.
 
As you have gone from a Nvidia card to a ATI card have you run driver sweeper to get rid of every trace of the Nvidia drivers?

Which ATI driver version are you using? If i remember right from Cat 9.4 onwards they don't support any cards under a 2000 series.
 
mame said:
You can and do have molex and PCI-E connectors that go into graphics cards. Even if you had a PSU with PCI-E connectors on, it isn't hard to connect these to an AGP graphics card. Cards that came out in both AGP and PCI-E such as this one are more likely to need extra/more power for the AGP version. My x1950pro AGP needed 2 additional power connectors to work. My 7600GT AGP needed 1 plugged in whereas the PCI-E version needed none
Click to expand...

Just to add to that I used to run a X1600pro 512mb AGP and that needed a 3.5" floppy power connector (!). So just make sure everything's connected and it's getting enough juice.
 
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