Sapphire ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Driver problem

Hi All, Maybe somebody can tell me what's incompatible between drivers and card.

Real simple symptoms, Sapphire branded ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card, 128MB, runs OK on non certified drivers that came on CD with card.

Windows Update constantly tells me to update drivers, when I do, video slows to a crawl, pages load from top to bottom like downloading a picture on a 56K modem.

Tried it a couple of times in the past with each new edition of Catalyst drivers, always have to roll back. I quit trying a while back. Had update site hide ATI driver updates.

Now today, Windows Update downloads new ATI Catalyst drivers (2-1-2005) as a Critical update along with scolding me for hiding a critical update.

Allowed installation, same problem, video slows to crawl. Roll back to non WHQL, get standard warning, override, all ok.

Sapphire site sends you to ATI for drivers, so no specials for this card.

Had used ATI uninstall tool from this board in the past, did not uninstall before this installation. Seemed a waste of time.

Question, what makes this driver installation critical? Is there a security risk?
Question, is this problem specific to all Sapphire 9800 cards, just mine, or all Sapphire cards?
Questions, is there anything I can do to fix it to run on new drivers? Or should I bother, since it runs OK on old drivers?

Any and all replies will be appreciated.

Martin

 

HI Steve:

Ok, Ok, Just that it never made any difference on previous attempts. And when I do this and the new drivers fail, the old drivers are gone, rollback does not work, have to uninstall the card and start from scratch with CD. The hardest part being finding the CD.

Also I am too dumb to figure out why this would be a critical update, the ones in the past were not. So critical that MSFT would override my hiding of ATI driver updates on their site.

Anyhow Steve, thanks for the input.


Martin

 

Martin,
Here are a couple tweaking tools for ATI drivers.

http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads22.html

ATI Refresh Rate Fixer - [2002-07-25 | Freeware | 336 Kb | Win All | 21556]
Set refresh rates for your ATI card in Windows 2k and XP

ATITool - [2005-01-10 | Freeware | 923 Kb | Win All | 40673]
ATITool is an overclocking utility designed for ATI video cards.

If you had it to do all over .. would you still go with ATI video card or Nvida.

I'm wondering if matching a Nvida Chipset on the Motherboard and a Nvida Video card would have any advantages?

Thanks
Rockit

 

I had several Nvida cards before, always used their universal drivers, never an update problem like I have had with these ATI drivers.

Got to say though, even though this ATI card is no longer State of the Art, I can't fault it, it runs the video flawlessly on the currently installed drivers. No complaints on performance.

My choice would be based on what was being offered, features, memory, performance and not least of all, price.

For me, spending $400. on a video card would be the ultimate waste of money. And with PCI Express and SLI, you can put two of these $400. plus cards in one machine. Yikes! I can't even imagine what that video would look like rendering a game.

My next build will be along the lines of what you are contemplating. Probably a waste of money for me. Although this machine is very fast for most applications, loading AVI files from my MiniDV camera and converting to MPEG for conversion to DVD is an agonizingly slow process. Uses 100% of processor and memory. (2.08gig AMD and 768MB PC3200 DDR)

So, every time I look at a catalog with those 64bit FXs, I get the itch.

When you get this mother up and running, post back your experiences and how you like it. Good luck.

Take care,

Martin

 

I'm just the opposite of you Martin. I used to have a Nvidia card in the computer I'm using right now and I was hard pressed to get it to run right on a new driver. I now have an ATI card and don't have any problems at all. I don't however, make a habit of upgrading just for the sake of having the latest and greatest. I'm with Steve. Wait for the next set to come out. In fact, if it were me, I wouldn't change them at all unless I was having some sort of problem that was supposedly addressed by the new drivers. It's just my opinion and you can take it for what it's worth. On this board that's pretty much nothing as it comes free of charge.

 

Yeah Zander, I understand. I stopped installing updates that MSFT Update site offered for ATI, those always went astray and messed up the video.

Only reason for this install and post was MSFT telling me that the new ATI drivers for the 9800 pro were critical updates. Never saw that for hardware before.

Of course, they messed up the video. So, I had to dig out the old CD to reinstall as I had taken Pete's advice and uninstalled everything ATI on this machine and could not roll back.

Video drivers as critical update???

Martin