After market OEM Radeon Cards - observations and fustrations

[William]

These past three days I have ben putting together a major upgrade to my
computer as follow:

mobo - msi 975x platinum
cpu - e6600 core 2 duo
ram - 2gb ddr2 800 corsair twin2x2046-6400
vid - sapphire x1950pro
ps - antec neoho 500w hi-effency

The first thing I noticed on this sapphire is that it is not an 'AVIVO'
unit, as my x800pro is. That is, it has no video in. Not a big deal, but I
would have liked to have known that up front. Fortunately my tuner card has
this covered. It just gripes me that this is missing without notification.

When installing the software - their is no multi-media center included.
Only the cat center and drivers. No multi-media, no dvd playback. Again -
I would have liked to have known this up front.

The board came with cat 6.9 so I went to ATI and downloaded the newest
drivers. They would not install, the program did not recognize the sapphire
board. So I went to the Sapphire's web site and found the drivers posted as
of 11/2/06 numbered 6.14 and down loaded that driver set. (70meg - boy am I
glad I have a high-speed connection!) They did in fact give me hdr and
anti-aliasing within Oblivion that I was interested in obtaining.

Now, I realize that I saved $100.00 purchasing this Sapphire card over the
ATI version, but I was not expecting these differences. I did not read any
warning from any review on these boards, or any posting on the order web
sites noting these differences. Overall. I was caught completely off-guard.
This has left me with an uneasy feeling. I suppose you could say, you get
what you pay for. I'll keep this in mind when I purchase a direct draw10
vid card next year.

I have now installed Oblivion and loaded my past saves. I have run the
program for an hour now to see what has changed. It is nice to run the
program at my LCD's native resolution of 1280x1024 with hdr on. The detale
has improved in all maters and it is a noticable improvement in performance.

The problems I have had with the mobo is another story.

William

 

[Barry Watzman]

Re: "The problems I have had with the mobo (msi 975x platinum) is
another story."

Storytime.

 

[First of One]

The first thing I noticed on this sapphire is that it is not an 'AVIVO'
unit, as my x800pro is. That is, it has no video in. Not a big deal, but
I would have liked to have known that up front. Fortunately my tuner card
has this covered. It just gripes me that this is missing without
notification.

The Sapphire X1950 Pro should be identical to the ATi-branded one, save for
the PCB color. They may even be produced at the same plant (either at
Sapphire's parent company, PCPartner in China, or contracted to Celestica in
Toronto).

This photo clearly shows a 9-pin VIVO port on the card:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/productfiles/168image1.jpg

You have to install the WDM drivers. Otherwise there will be an "unknown
device" in Windows Device Manager.

When installing the software - their is no multi-media center included.
Only the cat center and drivers. No multi-media, no dvd playback.
Again - I would have liked to have known this up front.

Did you have an AIW X800 before? MMC shouldn't work with non-AIW cards.
There is a plethora of DVD-player apps available, including free ones like
Media Player Classic.

The board came with cat 6.9 so I went to ATI and downloaded the newest
drivers. They would not install, the program did not recognize the
sapphire board.

Duh! Note this line on ATi's driver download page:
"Customers who own an ATI Radeon® X1950 PRO and looking for drivers, please
click here."

The standard Catalyst 6.10 drivers don't support the X1950 Pro yet,
regardless of brand. It helps to read the instructions sometimes...

Spending $100 on an ATi-branded card wouldn't gain you anything. ATi cards
include no bundled games, and they now have an equally short 1-year
warranty.

 

[Clint]

AFAIK, Avivo is not the same as VIVO (video in/video out). So your new card
does have the Avivo technology. Your old one did not, but it may have had
VIVO.

Clint

 

[William]

AFAIK, Avivo is not the same as VIVO (video in/video out). So your new
card does have the Avivo technology. Your old one did not, but it may
have had VIVO.

To clarify, my old card had Video In, Video Out. This one does not have
Video In. It's a different multi-pin connector. At first glance it looks
like a s-video connector, but it has more pins. The new card's connector,
has fewer pins.

 

[William]

The Sapphire X1950 Pro should be identical to the ATi-branded one, save
for the PCB color. They may even be produced at the same plant (either at
Sapphire's parent company, PCPartner in China, or contracted to Celestica
in Toronto).

The cat install program errored out stating it could not find any compatible
hardware with the driver being installed. I am assuming that ATI / Sapphire
have different codes in the firmware somewhere identifying them as
different? Perhaps it is as you have said in the next comment.

This photo clearly shows a 9-pin VIVO port on the card:
http://www.sapphiretech.com/en/productfiles/168image1.jpg

You have to install the WDM drivers. Otherwise there will be an "unknown
device" in Windows Device Manager.


Did you have an AIW X800 before? MMC shouldn't work with non-AIW cards.
There is a plethora of DVD-player apps available, including free ones like
Media Player Classic.

My mistake I have an ATI x850pro. not x800 as stated.

I'm running Windows Media Player v11 - seems to be adequate. I also have
Nero editing suite. And a few others I don't want to pollute my hd with.
I'll check out Media Player Classic - thank you for the reference.

Duh! Note this line on ATi's driver download page:
"Customers who own an ATI Radeon® X1950 PRO and looking for drivers,
please click here."

The standard Catalyst 6.10 drivers don't support the X1950 Pro yet,
regardless of brand. It helps to read the instructions sometimes...

Didn't see that - woops.

Spending $100 on an ATi-branded card wouldn't gain you anything. ATi cards
include no bundled games, and they now have an equally short 1-year
warranty.

Thank you for your input.

William

 

[William]

Re: "The problems I have had with the mobo (msi 975x platinum) is another
story."

Storytime.

1st thing I noticed: WinXP Pro SR2b did not require the sata driver floppy
disk to install. After all the trouble I went to make one!

XP install went fine, but as I loaded other drivers (for the mobo) I noticed
my dvd started to become unresponsive after about 2 minutes of spinning. I
had to remove the cd and restart on two different driver installs. This had
to do with mobo drivers, and I still am not sure I am not having issues with
this. One driver was for the Realtek on-board sound, the other was for the
USB-2 ports. I set the timing on the dram hoping this might be the problem.

My USB ports were dead - nix, nill, no-go. The worse part of this, is my
Internet connection is through a hi-speed USB wireless port. Knowing that I
was about to --UPDATE-- everything, this was a grave concern to me.
Activation of XP, Office, etc, then updates to everything including the mobo
was to be done through the Internet, so this had to be corrected.

Fortunately, while researching the purchase of this mobo on newegg, I read
the reviews posted on this mobo. One user commented that the usb ports were
dead until he disabled usb2.0 in the bios. So I went into bios and turned
off usb2.0 and I was in business! I still have hi-speed usb2.0 off, and
have not figured what I am doing wrong. I did install the Intel ICH7R ini
files as instructed by the mobo cd. Their is something wrong here and I
have yet to research and correct this problem.

I flashed the bios as suggested, set the timing on the dram as suggested,
and all seems to be settling down. Now I am installing drivers for
everything else, installing software, personal files, cleaning out my
e-mail, and posting on the newsgroups.

This mobo has allot of over-clocking and tweaking it can do. It will take
months to learn its capabilities.

William

 

[William]

If anybody is interested, I gave up on this mobo, the MSI 975X Platinum. I
have sent it back to Newegg and went with the ASUS P5W DH.

I tried everything I could think of. I tried the Intel driver for the USB 2
ports, the XP generic USB 2 port driver, and I sent in a technical request
for help to MSI. Nothing - no help.

I could see it in the Device Manager, looking at the Intel ICH7R USB2
Enhanced Host Controller. When on, I had no scanner, printer, or Wi-Fi.
When I disabled this driver, then three pop-ups would occur. All was OK.
Enable the driver, and some would stop immediately, none would not be their
on re-boot. At first my omni-directional Wi-Fi, a Hawkings USB unit worked
in USB 1.1 mode, but it stopped being recognized after 3 days. And this is
only the USB problems.

The Hi-Fi sound is messed up on games, (phase distortion on different
inputs). The optical drives are sluggish and sometimes do not auto-start.

This board has problems. Good luck to anyone who purchases this one.
Perhaps they will work out the bugs sometime in the future. They need to
take it off the market until they do.

William

PS: I hope the ASUS is a good board. The last one I had was perfect its
whole life.

 

[Clint]

Let me know what you think of the P5W DH. I just picked one up this week,
but probably won't pop it in until I stick in Vista (hopefully next week).

Clint