Ya, welcome to the wonderful world of ATI
Smartgart - which is only installed if you use the main setup.exe
If you install the drivers and CP separately, it wont load
There is a utility to uninstall vid drivers on ATI site
There is a utility to uninstall smartgart on ATI site
Smartgart was a move by ATI to lessen its help call load: when you boot up the utility scans your system to see if full features you have checked or AGP mode is doable. The choice is 0 (none) 1X 2X 4X 8X. Note that with AGP 0 it means transfers to the contiguous gart table set up in system mem will not be allowed, everything will be done ON CARD or PCI - WITH AGP 8X Voltage Specs if set so in bios of mobo. In other words their wonderful $400 card will not function correctly at full bus load with your vidcard drivers, mobo chipset, mobo chipset drivers (AGP-PCI) and mobo bios.
So O.K., you remove smartgart and it doesnt override your attempt at running the card for what you paid for, now you will get BSOD's, kickback to desktop, spontaneous reboots, or things like Solidworks wont run right. Remember at AGP "0" if textures cant go to the bus, they have to wait in cue on the card vram.
Can you spell S-L-O-W-D-O-W-N??
So now, you can shuffle the deckchairs on the Titanic:
Try OLD OLD drivers like the 3.1 (
NOT 3.10)
Pray for new mobo BIOS
Update chipset drivers
Omega drivers
Revert to OLDER DX
Change mobo (chipset)
Change mem type - singlesided/dual/DDR rating etc. so that the friggin gart table will load correctly.
Downclock your CPU (thats what I said)
Downgrade your card to 4X or even 2X in BIOS.
Buy a 1000 Watt PSU
Take the card out to desert and hang it from a tree and shoot at it with 000 buck.
Plan to spend at least 200 hours to get it running so-so.
I know you wound all the options out to the max - which one would would fully expect with an "Ultra" - and smartgart said to you "Sorry Charlie". Just when the "loop" was getting fixed with 4X they came out with 8X, and now that 8X is being "massaged" here comes PCI-express. Feel like a greyhound chasing a rabbit???
And for the dozen people who will now post with "it works perfect for me", well - it doesn't work perfect for Markfw900 (or me).
Edit:
I posted this on homepage comments today:
The dirty little secret is that 8X AGP simply doesn't work - if it was not for huge on card memory, you wouldn't be able to run anything.
So heres your 89 page AGP 8X nightmare.
http://tinyurl.com/yvqzv
I just bought a 9800pro and its a non functioning piece of crap. So now I have to go thru the endless driver in/out shuffle. I am really getting tired of this. The fact yours may work perfectly is irrelevant - for the average Joe, its a hopeless no-win situation.
Why the hell cant I just put in a card, load the drivers and have it work 100% - is that asking too much?? If a game or app doesnt work with a state of the art card they should not be allowed to sell it.
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