OT (sort of) - ATI 9700 Pro woes - Long

[Guest PhilC]

All,Well I received my ATI 9700 Pro card a couple of days ago and seem to have ruined what had been a complete success with my ATI Radeon 32 DDR card. I'm not sure that it is the 9700's fault entirely but it has not been fun.I removed all previous video drivers, shut down and installed the card. Restarted and installed the Catalyst drivers included on the CD with the 9700. Restarted. Card and monitor were recognized and everything looked pretty good. Only problem was my SB Live! card no longer sounded off. No problem, reinstalled the drivers and sound was back. I Quickly checked my video settings and jumped into FS2002. I immediately noticed a few more fps (I did not really expect much fps improvement) but the main thing was that everything looked awesome! I could easily run up a few FS2K2 display settings and retain a decent fps... something I couldn't do before.I exited MSFS and decided to go ahead and get the latest v2.3 Catalyst drivers to update. I was pretty sure that the included version was 2.2 and the 9700 was listed as one of the cards in the 2.3 update.First I tried to uninstall the 2.2 version on my PC as ATI recommends. For some reason, the Add/Remove Programs would not let me choose the ATI drivers in the ATI included pop-up window. It was grayed out. I decided to install the 2.3 anyways since I had done this before with success from one .1 version to another.This is where my trouble started.After the install and reboot, as Windows was loading my monitor went into sleep mode (or the video card shut down??) and I could do nothing but press the reset button. Same thing happened with each reboot.No problem, I can fix this. Started up in safe mode and removed the drivers (it let me this time). Reboot and the system restarts in VGA mode. I reinstall the drivers from the CD (they worked before, right?) and reboot. Same thing... monitor in sleep mode.Since then, here is what I have done:1) Repaired/Reinstalled XP (with SP1 included) three times.2) Deleted all ATI related files from the System and System32 folders and ATI references from the registry.3) Uninstalled video drivers... Reinstalled from the CD... monitor in sleep mode (5 times).4) etc., etc.I am now running in a terribly ugly VGA mode.I have visited the ATI website, read the FAQs, searched support, etc. and have just recently sent a problem report to their tech staff. While I wait for their response...Does anybody have any ideas what I may have missed or how I could recover from this? Don't preach to me about the flaws with ATI's products and drivers. I have always been an ATI fan and have loved their latest driver releases.At least I still have my ATI 32...

[Guest Deeks]

I use an ATI 8500 Retail and have had no problems with drive upgrades...but installing over previous driver versions seems to give most ppl problems. With XP you should have gone into system/hardware and done a 'roll back' on the driver and then installed the newer drive. Go check out this site:http://www.rage3d.com/board/Lots of helpful ppl there who can get you thru this problem. One other thing ...since you did not mention your MB make/model does it support 1.5volt AGP? Radeons are 1.5volt ONLY and usually won't boot or will go to sleep if your board only supports 3.0 volt AGP cards. Also did you install the control panel software for the Catalyst drivers as this is a seperate install from the D/L drivers from ATI's site.

[Guest]

I'm sorry about your 9700 troubles, I got my eye on this card, but now I'm not so sure. I have the ATI 64MB DDR card and have trouble updating the drivers as well. I just got my new PC three months ago and installed the ATI card from my old PC in there. The card installed fine on its own (XP). When I tried to update the driver, it keeps telling me "new hardware detected". I tell the PC where the new driver is and it still won't install without the error message. I have updated the driver three times with different ATI drivers and just one does not give me the error message.I have to keep going back to the older driver so I don't get the error message. No matter how I install it, I get the error message.Hans Groenewold

[Guest]

When did you apply XP SP1 ? I would uninstall SP1 to see what happens. I have a different video card,(GF3 TI200) but I've tried installing SP1 and try and get FS2k2 to run at high resolution. But it won't let me go higher than 1600x1200x32; it puts the monitor in sleep mode because the refresh rate is too high! I know the monitor can take it. And when i Uninstall SP1, everything comes back to normal with FS2K2 and high resolution.Just a thought,Pierre

[Guest]

Pierre,I hate to sound stupid, but what is SP1? I have my monitor refresh rate set at 85HZ and I'm running at 1152x864x16 resolution. I'm quite happy with the card's performance. I have my sliders maxed out except ATC 35% and terrain complexity 80%. I got my FPS locked at 25 and it stays right in the low twenties fairly consistently. I have a P4 with 2.4 GHZ, 768 DDR SDRAM PC2700. Thanks for your help. I just don't understand why one driver works without the error message and the others don't. They are from the same source too, ATIHans

[Guest]

seems like what is going on is the video drivers installed fine but you did not reinstall your monitor drivers.The default refresh rates for the default windows plug n play montior is usually really low.If you montiors refresh rate is set any higher than the inf pnp monitor it will go into sleep mode to keep the montior display from being permently messed up.With this being the case my advice is the following 1.go to your montior's website, download their drivers and install them2. remove all the ati drivers and anything that points to them.If you do not know what files to look for there will be a how to on rage3d.com3 now reinstall your drivers and you montior drivers AGAIN .Just leave your montiors refresh rate at optimal until you know everything is working 4 reboot and all should be ok .If not it is possble that something else is going on Richard Dillon KPDKSr First Officer www.jetstarairlines.com"Bill Grabowski's"ERJ-145 panel Beta TeamMD-11 panel Beta Team____________________________"Lets Roll" 9/11 Specs AMD 1600 XP MSI KT 266t pro2 512MB DDR 2100GF3 ti 200 64MB SBliveCh Products Yoke and Pedals(usb)Windows 2000 Serivce Pack 3

[Guest]

SP1 is the Service Pack for Windows XP.I'm not familiar with ATI's drivers, but under Windows XP, when you Uninstall a video driver, it normally cleans the registry well.You should look at each video driver as a specific piece of software: somes are buggy, some are not. Some work fine, some don't.They all have their peculiarities.When you try a new driver and find the results good or better than the previous one, then by all means : Keep it.I personally use 2048x1536x32 without antialiasing. To do that however, I have a few tweaks: use "default monitor" instead of the model I use (Optiquest V95), use 30.82 drivers (Geforce3) and let Fs2K2 offer me high resolution above 1600x1200.Have a nice day Hans,Pierre