Radeon 9800np problems. . . ?

[MisterRaven]

Upon the convincing of many people on this board, I bought a Radeon 9800np from Circuit City. I reformatted my drive before installing it, and after installing the included display drivers (Catalyst 3.6, I think) The card repeatedly failed to complete "drawing operations."

I uninstalled the drivers, downloaded Catalyst 3.9 from Ati's web site, and now I've been able to get things done.

Unfortunately, I would still get an occasional Drawing Operation failure, random reboot, and the driver was stuck in a continuous loop once.

I just disabled AGP fast writes in my motherboard's BIOS, and none of these errors have happened since. Will disabling fast writes affect performance, and in what way?

If this doesn't solve my problems for good, what should I do?

I will say this though: when this card works properly, it blows me away! Fantastic performance!

Also, my comp recognizes it as a 9800 Pro. Is this normal, or did I get lucky?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Rogodin2]

HM

It should be recognized as just a 9800 and not 9800pro.

Leave fastwrites off (it doesn't hinder performance).

Run powerstrip and see what your clock speeds are.


Glad you're enjoying it 🙂

rogo

 

[MisterRaven]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
HM

It should be recognized as just a 9800 and not 9800pro.

Leave fastwrites off (it doesn't hinder performance).

Run powerstrip and see what your clock speeds are.


Glad you're enjoying it 🙂

rogo

Do you mean to say that I might have actually gotten a 9800 Pro??? It boggles the mind. . . in a good way.

Also, in device manager, it says I have two 9800 Pros (I only have one, and I thought it was an np). . . the odd thing is that it says one of them is a PCI card(???). Any explanations?

 

[MisterRaven]

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
HM

It should be recognized as just a 9800 and not 9800pro.

Leave fastwrites off (it doesn't hinder performance).

Run powerstrip and see what your clock speeds are.


Glad you're enjoying it 🙂

rogo

I ran powerstrip, and it also says it's a pro. It read my clock speeds as Memory: 290MHz - Engine: 324MHz.

Are those Pro speeds?

 

[BlueWeasel]

The OS will see the 9800NP as 9800 Pro cards....so no, you don't have a pro. 🙁

Are you seeing a 9800 Secondary in device manager? This method is just by ATI to display dual monitors as your card can output as VGA and DVI (2 monitors).

 

[BlueWeasel]

Originally posted by: MisterRaven

Originally posted by: Rogodin2
HM

It should be recognized as just a 9800 and not 9800pro.

Leave fastwrites off (it doesn't hinder performance).

Run powerstrip and see what your clock speeds are.


Glad you're enjoying it 🙂

rogo

I ran powerstrip, and it also says it's a pro. It read my clock speeds as Memory: 290MHz - Engine: 324MHz.

Are those Pro speeds?

No...the default speed for the 9800NP is 325 core/290 memory.

The 9800NP's at CC all appear to have Infineon memory chips and the majority of those will not go past 325-330 without artifacts and graphical corruption.

 

[MisterRaven]

Damn.

Even though it's not a Pro, it's still a damn good performer though. Also, isn't the 9800np almost identical to the 9700pro in terms of performance?

Also, any idea as to what was causing the problems I listed in the first post of this thread? Anyone?

 

[BlueWeasel]

Everything I've read says the 9700pro is about 1% faster than the 9800NP. Based on that, I would say they are identical in performance.

Using the latest drivers (3.9) should help with alot of problems. As Ronodin mentioned, disabling fastwrites doesn't hinder performance and you need to make sure you've disabled it in the ATI control panel as well.