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[Agent Orange]

Section 1 - Introductory
Section 2 - Background Experience
Section 3 - Current Experience/Review
Section 4 - Comparison to Other Cards
Section 5 - Summary Review (very short and sweet)

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Section 1
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I've been playing some HL2 E1 and Counterstrike Source with this new card. Of course everything can max out fine. The card runs anything I
want it to. I might even install Bioshock and see how she handles, but I bet it'll be maxxed out on my resolution.
But how long can I game with it?

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Section 2
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You see I forgot why I hated ATI and stopped buying their cards no matter what. The first straw was back in 2001 on my Dual AMD Tyan board. ATI's 8600 would bluescreen from time to time because of its incompatibility with my Tyan board. Tyan blamed ATI, while ATI just ignored it all together.

Then the next straw was with my 9800 on a different board. The "VPU" always needed to be "recovered". There was no heat problems, and as a matter of fact I overclocked the CPU and RAM and the system temp. was still around 33°C. The VPU wasn't crashing, the drivers were what was crashing. Finally, after many driver updates, the crashes were occasional instead of the norm. Finally, after using Omega drivers, the crashes ceased. Omega is just a guy that optimizes ATI drivers after they've been released and does some of his own bug smashing.

Now its the end of 2007 and I finally bought an ATI card, because my board supports crossfire and the value vs. performance was better than nVidia. Also, I understand that I do run Vista now, mostly testing it out. But that doesn't mean that these drivers shouldn't be stable. The OS has been released for Beta for years and its been out on the market long enough for ATI to start fixing bugs.

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Section 3
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What's happening? The same thing that did back in 2001/2. The drivers have to be "recovered", which means their stupid, half assed service in the background that runs crashes. Sometimes it recovers, sometimes my computer is just froze. This is even just playing CounterStrike: Source. The temperature stays from 50°C to 60°C. That's fine for the card's temeprature.

Now ATI also has an unsupported ATI OverDrive (auto software overclocker) that you can run. I did run it just because once. This is after the random crashing. It ran its tests and maxxed out my Core and Memory clocks to....it didn't run and 3D content while doing so. It just wanted to check for artifacts on my desktop. Anyone who's ever overclocked knows that's not where you look for artifacts. If you get artifacts on just your desktop, then you won't be able to run anything with it. After the overclock, I ran the CS:S Video Stress test. Artifacts galore. I returned my clocks to factory. Maybe I'll mess with them later.

I'll end up using their tech. support for this if it continues. Omega doesn't make Vista drivers yet either. There's a couple of things that I can do. ATI recommends that I turn off Fast-Write. Mind you, I have a card that is PCI-Express...Fast-Write is an AGP only feature. I will probably start troubleshooting myself as well.

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Section 4
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What should you do? Just grab the 8600 GTS instead. The performance isn't much less than the 1950 PRO, however, I have the 512MB flavor, which the 8600 GTS didn't offer unless I wanted to pay $30 more than I did for my 1950 PRO, which brings the threshhold almost into the 8800 series price.

Remember, video card memory is for better texture quality, while GPU/VPU clocks are for performance. So it just wasn't worth it from a purely technical stand-point.

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Section 5
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Performance is great. Handles about anything I throw at it with no noticeable performance loss.
Driver set features are comparible to nVidia, but not as good. Although ATI's Adaptive AntiAliasing is a great idea.
Video playback quality, as usual, is better than nVidia, and now has even better HD features.
Price is standard. Bang for your buck for the 256 MB flavor should be from $120 - $130. The 512MB should be at $150.
Stability is poor. This is due more to the driver set than the card itself I believe. ATI's background Service seems to crash during a game...a lot.

[Vaj is for Fags]

Did you go for straight a straight up ATI card or did you get it from someone like Sapphire?  I know I've used Sapphire's drivers for my card and I've never had any issues with it. 

[Agent Orange]

Its a Sapphire...you do know that Sapphire's drivers are ATI's drivers right? They are both the same exact thing. The only thing Sapphire offers differently are the BIOS revisions.

[crazy time]

some manufacturers don't follow the reference design.  some like Gainward try to improve upon it (don't know any ATi manufacturers that do this).  others offer different heatsinks and clock speeds.  so it's not the same in all cases.

[Vaj is for Fags]

I thought Sapphire made a couple of tweaks for their stuff. 

[Agent Orange]

I thought Sapphire made a couple of tweaks for their stuff. 

I don't believe so. If they do, than they aren't changing the minor version portion like they should be.

I went ahead and tried installing their's, however, the ATI installer said that I already had them (I installed ATI's first).

[Agent Orange]

Well it seems that after some research, this is a HUGE problem. ATI has known about my problem since April and many people are pissed because we cannot play the newer games out there. A smaller amount of people have this sort of problem on XP, but the majority are Vista users.

ATI suggested at one point to just use one RAM stick, because some tool at DriverHeaven said that using just one stick of RAM gets rid of most problems in Windows Vista, because of how Vista handles the memory, which is a bit of crap.

I've gotten it a bit more stable by not running STEAM and using ATI Tool's Dynamic Fan Speed (not made by ATI). Still crashes, sometimes so hard that the video card will not re-establish communication until the computer has been off for about a minute.

I guess I'll end up using their tech. support and escalating it higher and higher. I'm good at this sort of thing though. So when I get pissed enough I'm sure you'll hear about what I said to ATI when the time comes.

[Vaj is for Fags]

Well, I had been considering getting one of these cards...  Sorry to hear that you get to be the guinea pig instead of me (well, kinda).

[Agent Orange]

Well I just spent some time troubleshooting it. I set up a good formula for fanspeeds. I increase the fan to 95% when it hits 71°. Now I played The Witcher for probably 45 minutes straight before I stopped. Before that, the game would crash 5 into it.

I don't think its a heat problem. I think its a software logic problem.

[Agent Orange]

Sweet. I sent back my X1950 PRO into Newegg, who stopped selling it. They are giving me a refund. So I popped in my old X550. Hey it crashes too! Even on old games. It does the best on Source games, but even still it'll crash. Vista's Problem Solver says ATI knows about the problem, but has no fixes.

ATI's knowledgebase says that they know about it and still have no fixes. The new 7.11 drivers don't even talk about the fact that regardless of all the blackscreen fixes they did, that their cards still fucking crash "randomly".

Fuck them.

[Lazy Korean]

sorry to hear bout your card having so much trouble

if i remember, the new 7.11 cat for the drivers were mainly create to help better optimize there newer cards

[Agent Orange]

sorry to hear bout your card having so much trouble

if i remember, the new 7.11 cat for the drivers were mainly create to help better optimize there newer cards

Better to optimize a card that doesn't work on the biggest new operating system than to fix it I guess.