9500 pro

OK, after much research and testing, I have resolved my wavy lines once and for all.

I had two separate causes of the lines. Both I can do on command. Both of these are separate issues but resulted in the same issue. Both things for me had to be resolved to remove the wavy lines in ALL cases. While testing long term, I used a light blue background. In games I could often lookinto the sky and see the lines as well. So I can now state that I have solved lines in games and desktop with the following.

#1. Power to the card is an issue. If I had the card hanging off the same power lead as either of my CDROM drives (1 burner), the spinning up of the drive created the rolling lines. So. Luckily, I had a sperate trunk of leads not in use that had a 3 1/2" floppy connector. I now go direct from PSU to the card with no power sharing on that trunk. Still had the lines when the CD's spun up. I found it was because when I assembed the PC, I had tucked parts of the power lead lines in behind the CDROM drive bays. There is iterference from that area as well. I pulled the video card power line completely away from all the drives so it is stright down to the Video card from the PSU.

#.2 There were still occasional rolling lines when leaving games or comming out of applications. Probably due to resolution and brightness changes and so on. I remembered back to a comment on another post to me about some monitors were not a perfect Vertical Sync match for the 9700 Pro causing lines horizontally. To resolve this once and for all and for all resolutions, I went into the Display section of the ATI control pannel where they have the plus minus settings for vertical hight and horizonatl width. In order to make the screen larger vertically, the driver adjusts the vertical frequncy!!! My monitor has a on screen display that reports the exact frequency mode I am currently in for both horizontal and Vertical. I proved this by playing with the display adjustment screen in the control pannel and while I pushed the plus button to make the screen bigger up and down vertically and the Vertical frequency of the monitor changed as well. For my model of monitor, two pushes up and the lines dissapeared forever. I had to repeat this for 1280x960 and 1280x1024 as I often game in those settings. Much to my hapiniess, the driver remembers different Vertical frequency changes for each resolution. My worst challenge was in 1280x1024. The lines were originally Huge waves and VERY noticable. One click to increase vertical width and the lines got really small and thin and less noticable. One more click and they dissapeared forever! I found using the minus key to reduce vertical width only sort of worked. Going the other way worked perfectly with 2 or three clicks!

IMPORTANT!: After fine tuning the vertical sync with the vertical width adjustment, I had to re-run Reforce or some of my games somehow reverted to 60Hz again like I had just installed XP. Thankfully, re-running REFORCE did not make any changes to my Vertical hight adjustements and I still get no lines.

Having adjusted the vertical width and isolating my power line to the card, I have been using my rig in and out of games for a few weeks and wathcing very closely I have not had a single wavy or thin line issue since!

I really hope this helps and perhaps should be made a sticky!!!

BTW, ATI had no idea why 40% of all owners were getting this when I talked to them and the only resolution they could think of was using the DVI to VGA adaptor. That solution sucks! It caused my monitor refresh to blink twice when booting to the destop or entering or leaving a game. Very annoying. My solution takes a little tinkering but the result is that the card now interacts with the monitor exacly the way it should.

Charles. (Line free at last!!!!!!!!)

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