Problems with new 9600

[linus5171]

I just got a new Sapphire 9600 256 MB from Newegg and had no trouble installing with Catalyst 4.9 drivers. Doom 3 went from about 15 FPS to 30 FPS and Call of Duty works OK. Far Cry goes to a black screen and crashes, abd Battelfield 1942 starts up with a unreadable screen flickering from corner to corner.

I have a HP a520n system, 3200+ AMD, 512 Meg RAM , Asus Motherboard with built in 64 Meg shared nvidia chip, all drivers updated. All of these games worked fine before 9600 install, I wanted faster gaming.

I don't see that much improvement and some games don't work. Do I need a Nvidia video card? I read the forums and some people with same hardware have no problems, some do.

Any ideas?

 

[2Xtreme21]

The Radeon 9600 is a low to medium end card. If possible, return it for a 9800... that's where you'll get the performance upgrade.

If you feel adventurous you may want to buy one of the nVidia / ATI high end cards (6800 / x800 respectively). Then you'll see the performance fly.

If you don't want to upgrade, my only suggestion to you is to disable your onboard graphics completely (aka, put 0 MB memory shared in the BIOS). This will free up some system RAM for you.

 

[linus5171]

I would have bought a higher end card, but the power supply on my HP system is only 250 watts. The 9800 and other faster cards require a 300 watt or more power supply. I could put in a new ps but it would void the warranty which I would rather not do at this point. I don't need 100 FPS but I thought the 9600 might help, not hinder games. I was hoping my problem might sound familiar and someone had a fix.

Thanks