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Good bye Nvidia.. Hello ATI...

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Bugeyes

Member
Joined
Oct 14, 2002
Location
Australia
Well I just ordered my first ATI based vga card, it's a "GeCube 9800 Pro Extreme" [core=400, mem=700], NOT the 9800XT !

But I'm still not sure I've made a good decision, quite a few of my m8s say that ati cards / drivers are very bugy and I can expect a **** load of problems :eek: :eek:

One of there favourite's is that because I have a Nforce 400 Ultra mainboard, I will get more problems because Nvidia want you to use there chipset with there vga cards and engineer them so that if you use other makers vga's you will get lower performance and more blue screens ?

I did quite alot of researching on the net, and found nothing to back up there claims ! There seems to be just as many people having problems with Nvidia / Nforce, than there are with ATI / Intel.

So if there are any of you good people out there that have an Nforce 400 U and ATI vga rig, please feel free to comment, your experiences and advice would be appreciated.

My system:

Amd XP2500+ @ 2200MHz
1 Gig of Buffalo PC3200
9800 Pro
SB live value
2 x 40Gb ata133 in Raid 0
Antec 550 Wat PSU
 
i've had no problems with my card & nf2 chipset.(other then the one time i almost fried the GPU due to a fan crapping out on me, but thats nothing you should have to worry about :))

runs great, fast, and no blue screens.

the ati drivers might be a bit buggy. 40% of the time, the screen stays black when i switch my AA/AF settings around. just noitced this to happen with the 3.10 drivers.

other then that, this is a great setup!!
enjoy :)
 
You wont have any problems at all with an ATi card in an nVidia chipset. Ive been running an nForce2/9500 Pro combo since they were released

As for buggy drivers...their drivers are no more buggy then nVidia's. They were really bad 2+ years ago, but not anymore
 
Sounds like you have some genuine nVidia fanboys as friends.

Anyways, I agree with Evnas, drivers aren't a problem and neither are the non-existant bugs between the nVidia chipset and the ATI card.
 
i have a radeon 9800 pro and an nforce2 chipset, and i still have not had a single problem.
 
vinny77 said:
you just have to make sure u install the video card drivers befor the nforce drivers.

I was going to do a fresh instal of window when the 9800 arives, are you saying I should install the video card drivers before I install the Nforce drivers on a fresh intalled windows XP home ?

I was under the impression that the Nforce should be installed FIRST ?
 
vinny77 said:
you just have to make sure u install the video card drivers befor the nforce drivers.

ALWAYS install motherboard drivers ther very first thing you do. It installs your IDE drivers, AGP drivers, etc. The first thing you do in Windows should always be to install the motherboard drivers :)

Bugeyes: Do it in this order...

Motherboard drivers
Direct X 9
Video card drivers
Sound card drivers
Any other drivers
Everything else :)
 
Evnas said:


ALWAYS install motherboard drivers ther very first thing you do. It installs your IDE drivers, AGP drivers, etc. The first thing you do in Windows should always be to install the motherboard drivers :)

Bugeyes: Do it in this order...

Motherboard drivers
Direct X 9
Video card drivers
Sound card drivers
Any other drivers
Everything else :)


Yup thats what I thought... thanks evnas.. oh by the way, is that a photo of you in your avitar ?.....lol
 
I've been using two different Nforce2/9800 machines for a while with no serious issues. Performance is great.
 
I have had 3 revs of the asus a7n8xdelux(1.04, 1.06 and 2.0) and they all have had an ati 9700pro, ati 9800pro and a FX 5900pro in them with NO PROBS. All combos too.

Yes don't install video card drivers first, install mobo drivers first.
 
Hey Bugeyes, I'm in the same boat as you. My previous three card purchases have been NVidia, and I just got a 9800Pro. I just installed it on my NVidia nForce2 mobo (not 400U). In fact, I installed it twice (dual boot). Both times I installed NVidia's nForce drivers first. The first time I installed the ATI Cat 3.10 drivers before DX9, and it seemed to act a hair flaky until I installed DX9. The second time I installed DX9 before the ATI drivers, and it worked better. Either way, the machine runs fine.

AFAIK, the only problem with ATI drivers that I've heard of lately is with AA, anybody know the scoop on this? From another message board:

"ATI Released a Statement saying they've Found a "Bug" In Catalyst 3.8-3.10 That Results in A Disfunctional FSAA.."

Any truth to this?
 
Last edited:
dunno, everything i play looks like eye candy with the AA enabled, are you referring to the supersampling issue? a/w i also just upgraded from 3 nVidia cards and wish now that i had gotten a decent ati card to begin with :D
 
rmfought said:
Hey Bugeyes, I'm in the same boat as you. My previous three card purchases have been NVidia, and I just got a 9800Pro. I just installed it on my NVidia nForce2 mobo (not 400U). In fact, I installed it twice (dual boot). Both times I installed NVidia's nForce drivers first. The first time I installed the ATI Cat 3.10 drivers before DX9, and it seemed to act a hair flaky until I installed DX9. The second time I installed DX9 before the ATI drivers, and it worked better. Either way, the machine runs fine.

AFAIK, the only problem with ATI drivers that I've heard of lately is with AA, anybody know the scoop on this? From another message board:

"ATI Released a Statement saying they've Found a "Bug" In Catalyst 3.8-3.10 That Results in A Disfunctional FSAA.."

Any truth to this?

If ATi released any sort of statement, we would have all heard about it, not a select few.

Anyways, AA also works fine for me, except with Deus Ex 2, but its not because of the 3.8-3.10 drivers.
 
If anything Ive had more trouble from the nForce2 chipset then from my Radeon(s). No issues in any game that I run except Homeworld2, after I ran the game updater it trashed the whole game (studdering, crashes u name it) so I had to reinstall the game to version 1.0...... it runs fine without the "update"....never any ATI caused game issues though.
 
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