driver issues again

[whattaguy]

Well, my BBA 9800pro is still under the 30-day money back period at Fry's, but heard that the MSI was just an underclocked 9800xt. So I got the MSI card (actually I'll save about $30 b/c of tax vs shipping), but installing ATI's latest Catalyst drivers (7/04) gives me a rainbow of colorful lines across my screen at the welcome screen of XP.

I then had to manually shut down, remove the drivers in safe mode via "add/remove programs", and run driver cleaner. I then tried reinstalling the drivers with the furnished MSI ATI drivers, but the system froze in Windows which led me to manually shut down again. After about 2 or 3 re-boots (not changing any settings) things ran ok. My 3dmark03 scores only got me about 5250.

Any ideas? I went through this process a few times with the same result. Also, I put back the "old" bba 9800pro to totally removed everything, and did the above process again. Same results.

In hindsight, I should've just kept the 1st 9800pro in my system.

Any ideas?

Asus P4T533-C mobo
1024gigs of RDRAM
P4 2.4B cpu @ 2.66
Thermaltake 480 PSU

 

[Special1Sauce]

Who cares about 3dMark anymore I mean run some real games.

 

[whattaguy]

Originally posted by: Special1Sauce
Who cares about 3dMark anymore I mean run some real games.

Thanks for the heads up, and I'm aware of that. But I know that the freezing issue is not "normal". Also, why aren't the Catalyst drivers from ATI working?

Thanks again.

 

[LTC8K6]

I am guessing that smartgart turned your agp mode to off.

If so, you may need to reload your mobo's chipset drivers and/or DX9.

 

[whattaguy]

Originally posted by: LTC8K6
I am guessing that smartgart turned your agp mode to off.

If so, you may need to reload your mobo's chipset drivers and/or DX9.

What's "smartgart"?

 

[LTC8K6]

Display properties.

Smartgart tab.

What does it say?

 

[whattaguy]

Unfortunately, i'm at "work". So I couldn't tell you.

 

[LTC8K6]

Smartgart is an ATI feature that automatically configures your AGP settings. It occasionally messes up and you end up running in PCI mode. You can check by going into display properties and seeing what Smartgart reports about your AGP speed.

You can also run DXDIAG and see if it says AGP texture acceleration is enabled. It will be disabled if Smartgart has turned your AGP speed to off.

The cure is usually a reinstall of your mobo chipset drivers and sometimes DX9.

If smartgart is screwing up, and you can't get it to properly set your AGP speed, you can uninstall just the smartgart part of the driver with an unistaller you can find at ATI's website.