My Temp Video Card Is Horribly Retarded

[hepcat06]

First of all, here?s my rig since I know people will want this info before answering my questions.

ASUS A8N-E Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 1GHz FSB Socket 939
Kingston ValueRAM 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM
eVGA 256-P2-N515-AX Geforce 7800GT 256MB
WD Caviar SE16 SATA 300MB/s 250GB
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS Sound Card
Antec LifeStyle SONATA II Piano Black Computer Case
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
Dell 2405 Monitor

I built the machine in early February, and added a second WD 320 GB hard drive last month.

I?m in EVGA?s step-up program and I actually just mailed out the old card this afternoon. Once my number was near the top, I decided to get a temporary video card to use while waiting for the new one to arrive and also to have as a backup in case my new 7900GT Superclocked doesn?t work. (I have heard of people having trouble with them.)

The temp card I picked out is a Sapphire Radeon 7000 PCI 64MG. You can find its full specs at this Newegg link:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16814102447

The problem is that this card won?t play back videos. I?ll try and start one up and the sound will begin, but I?ll just get a black screen. This happens in Windows Media Player, Media Player Classic and VLC. Worse, when I try to exit one of these programs, it will turn off, but the sound will keep going and eventually the computer crashes and I have to reboot.

Now I know I shouldn?t be expecting much from a $32.00 video card, but this thing did get pretty good reviews. I?m not trying to play games with it, and it is supposed to support a maximum resolution of 2048x1536. At the moment, I only have it set at 1024x768.

I did update the card?s drivers, which were released less than a month ago, and are supposed to be for Windows MCE. I don?t know if it matters, but just before I installed the temp card, I also updated the A8N-E Bios to the latest version, 1011.

Does anyone have any ideas on a simple solution to this problem? I don?t want to try anything too technical, especially when there?s nothing else wrong with the computer. I understand the best answer may be to just wait for the new card. However, if there is not a simple solution to this, I?m probably going to send the temp card back because it clearly is not working properly.

Thanks in advance.

 

[elzmaddy]

It seems to be having a problem when using some video-playback capability of your video card. Can you try to turn off either Hardware Acceleration for your video card (in the device properties) or hardware rendering options in your video player software? (I know MPC lets you turn this off but I am not sure which one it is).

 

[hepcat06]

Originally posted by: elzmaddy
It seems to be having a problem when using some video-playback capability of your video card. Can you try to turn off either Hardware Acceleration for your video card (in the device properties) or hardware rendering options in your video player software? (I know MPC lets you turn this off but I am not sure which one it is).

I just spent an hour trying to figure this out. I can't find a hardware acceleration option for the card, so I don't know whether it's turned on or off. The help file that I assume was installed with the drivers won't load up. Firefox claims the file doesn't exist. I found a manual on ATI's website, but it was useless. Googling also brought up pages of completely irrelevant information.

I also could not find anything in MPC that has to do hardware rendering. Maybe there's an option that does the same thing, but I don't know where it is.

Thanks for your post, but at this point I'm just going to wait for the new card and then send this one back. It's worthless.

 

[hepcat06]

OK, I said I wasn't going to keep messing with this, but of course I did. :roll:

After fiddling with the videocard's settings some more, my computer will no longer open windows when I click on any programs. So, I can't re-open the ATI program to restore the card's default settings. I thought of restarting in safe mode, but I can't click on start-->Run-->msconfig to set the computer to do that.

Nor can I start the computer in safe mode by restarting and hitting F8. That just takes me to a screen that asks me which device I want to boot from. It doesn't give me an option to start in safe mode.

Hooray for modern technology!