Defective ATI Video Card

[cdm0]

After having my ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV for over a year now, I've come to conclude that my video card is most likely defective. I bought it from newegg.com and it was OEM. Anyway, the reason I think it's defective is because it basically sucks! I'm running an Athlon XP 2000+ processor with 512 RAM and all high quality components. This piece of crap video card can't even run Quake 2 or the new Need For Speed Underground. And sometimes Windows is reallllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllly sluggish. I know it's the video card because I used my brother's cheapo GeForce 2 MX400 and both the above games ran flawlessly.

Now, I can't RMA the product through NewEgg because it's been over a year and if I want to talk to ATI about it, I have to pay 1.25 per minute through their 900 #.

Does anyone know what I should do? I've already bought a new video card and I want to get this one either replaced or sell it. Does anyone have any experience w/ defective video cards through ATI? What should I expect if I do decide to call them?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Aftermath]

I'm not trying to sound like an ass, but if it really took you more than a year to finilize this opinion, then why are you complaining about it? If it seemed sluggish and crappy the day you got it, why didn't you run some benchmarks, look at some numbers and comparisons, and determine it was the video card while you could still RMA it? It's like driving home in a brand new car, but it runs like ass off the lot, but you wait until the warranty is up to take it to the dealer and say "Well, it's always been a piece. Never did run properly. What a crappy car, it must be defective."

I would reccomend a few things before you start claiming it's defective. First off, run a few basic benchmarks, see how it compares to other All in Wonder Radeon 8500 DV cards to see if it really doesn't hold up at all.

One thing you could do to possibly clear up some issues, is do a clean install of some newer drivers. You didn't mention which ones you are using, but if you swapped the card out for a GeForce 2, (assuming I read that correctly), then you've probably got at least a couple different layers of drivers floating around.

Use a program like Driver Cleaner, and purge the drivers you have, then re-install some newer ones. If the problems still persist, then come back and ask for more help.

Though for next time, keeps these tips in mind: To make a more accurate diagnosis, you should list your system specs, operating system, driver versions, stuff like that. Simply saying "This product is slower than another product, what's wrong?" doesn't give much to go on.

I realize you're asking about ATi and returning defective cards, but really maybe you should look into the card itself and varifying problems before wasting a bunch of time trying to return it. It may be something simple that you accidently overlooked.

 

[cdm0]

When I first got the card, I played CS on it for a few weeks. The game ran without any sluggishness from what I remember. Then I didn't play any games for a while and my Windows performance seemed OK, which is why it never occured to me that my video card was possibly defective.

As for the drivers, I'm pretty sure that's not the issue. I even recently formatted my entire system and did a fresh install of the newest Catalyst drivers from ATI. Nothing changed. No need to run benchmarks either because it's clearly visible that this thing is performing incorrectly. I know that sounds cocky, but it's a fact I've come to realize.

As for my system specs:
Soyo SY-KT400 Dragon Ultra Motherboard
AMD Athlon XP 2000+ CPU
512 MB Mushkin PC-2700 RAM
ATI AIW Radeon 8500DV

 

[PunDogg]

my ATI 7500SE just died about 3 days ago, going to buy a new vid card from newegg.com very soon

Dogg

 

[Viper96720]

Since it's an OEM your warranty ran out awhile ago.

 

[Matthias99]

Did you check the hardware (like make sure the vid card fan is spinning, it's mounted properly, the GPU heatsink isn't falling off, etc.)? And you might want to try a slightly older set of drivers (like 3.7) -- maybe there's something up with the new ones on your hardware?

 

[mikeford]

Maybe some setting got messed up, AGP slot stuff, lots can go wrong on the software side.

I am going bonkers right now with a Sapphire 8500LE from Newegg, which does a restart every time XP detects it and starts to load a driver. (going in to change the option in XP to not autorestart on errors, but pretty certainly its going back to Newegg).