AIW 9800SE Advice please?

Nickinakinu · Mar 29, 2009, 07:50 AM

Hi to everyone,
Just recently a card that (going by photos I've seen) I'm pretty certain is a Hercules 3D Prophet AIW 9800SE has come into my possession, for the princely sum of £10, to go in a 'backup' system I've built. I was wondering what will be the best drivers to use with it? I'm going to use it primarily just as a VGA card - unless anyone can point me in the right direction to obtain the cables I need to get the video capture / TV receiver part of it up & running too or maybe I plug in a standard S-VIdeo cable to enable video capture? Aside from using it as a VGA card video capture would be the part I'm mainly interested in as I currently use the s-video capture facility on the Hauppage HVR-1300 in my main HTPC to view & record TV programmes on my Sky+ box. Looking at the stories of other peoples woes with AIW cards, might it be a better idea -i.e. less trouble - to forget using it as a video capture card and just put an in old Hauppage BT878 'Fusion' -based card I have lying around instead?
I'm saying this as I've recently had some not-very-good experiences with an ATI HD4850 in my main HTPC, and have reverted to using an NVidia 8800GTS in that particular system which is now working far, far better in every way than it ever did with the HD4850. I'm not sure if I should put this down to my HTPC having a first-generation PCI-express slot and the HD4850 being a PCI-express 2.0 card, although I thought the two specifications were meant to be backwardly compatible, either using a PCI-ex 2.0 card in a first generation socket or vice versa. I strongly suspect it to have been down to ATI's cr*p driver. I've never particularly liked ATI cards, or more to the point never liked ATI's CCC user interface, but for the sake of the backup system, the AIW9800SE should be a good deal more capable than the 64MB NVidia MX4000 it was going to have had installed. Given that it's unlikely I'll be getting to use the video capture facility on the AIW9800SE ( unless I can plug an S-VIdeo cable in to it) might I be better off using an Omega driver?
Sorry if I've waffled o a bit, but all opinions/suggestions would be appreciated
Thanks, N.

IvanV · Mar 29, 2009, 10:09 AM

If you dislike CCC so much, you have several options (although I don't know when did you use it as you mention that you used to have Nvidia cards; if it were a long time ago, you might find it greatly improved). You may go for an old driver that came with classic Control Panel or for Omegas which would allow you to try to mod the card into 9800Pro (there's no guarantee that the disabled pipes work well, though, so yuo may pass on that since wou probably won't be gaming much on it anyway) or install the latest official drivers without the CCC (just choose custom install).

Choosing a 9800 card over a GF4 MX was a good call, ATi's card should have vastly superior video output.

On a side note, if the difference you're observing now on the other machine (HTPC) isn't purely subjective (in other words you may be observing the picture more carefuly to make sure that everything is fine and notice imperfections you were missing before) that is very strange as for a few generations all discrete cards have fairly impeccable image quality. PCI-e 1.0 on the motherboard shouldn't be a problem, I believe that only some GF 8800GTs had issues with them (but I think that they simply didn't work).

Mar 29, 2009, 07:50 AM	#1
Nickinakinu DriverHeaven Newbie Join Date: Jun 2008 Location: Planet Earth Posts: 8 Rep Power: 0 System Specs	AIW 9800SE Advice please? Hi to everyone, Just recently a card that (going by photos I've seen) I'm pretty certain is a Hercules 3D Prophet AIW 9800SE has come into my possession, for the princely sum of £10, to go in a 'backup' system I've built. I was wondering what will be the best drivers to use with it? I'm going to use it primarily just as a VGA card - unless anyone can point me in the right direction to obtain the cables I need to get the video capture / TV receiver part of it up & running too or maybe I plug in a standard S-VIdeo cable to enable video capture? Aside from using it as a VGA card video capture would be the part I'm mainly interested in as I currently use the s-video capture facility on the Hauppage HVR-1300 in my main HTPC to view & record TV programmes on my Sky+ box. Looking at the stories of other peoples woes with AIW cards, might it be a better idea -i.e. less trouble - to forget using it as a video capture card and just put an in old Hauppage BT878 'Fusion' -based card I have lying around instead? I'm saying this as I've recently had some not-very-good experiences with an ATI HD4850 in my main HTPC, and have reverted to using an NVidia 8800GTS in that particular system which is now working far, far better in every way than it ever did with the HD4850. I'm not sure if I should put this down to my HTPC having a first-generation PCI-express slot and the HD4850 being a PCI-express 2.0 card, although I thought the two specifications were meant to be backwardly compatible, either using a PCI-ex 2.0 card in a first generation socket or vice versa. I strongly suspect it to have been down to ATI's cr*p driver. I've never particularly liked ATI cards, or more to the point never liked ATI's CCC user interface, but for the sake of the backup system, the AIW9800SE should be a good deal more capable than the 64MB NVidia MX4000 it was going to have had installed. Given that it's unlikely I'll be getting to use the video capture facility on the AIW9800SE ( unless I can plug an S-VIdeo cable in to it) might I be better off using an Omega driver? Sorry if I've waffled o a bit, but all opinions/suggestions would be appreciated Thanks, N. __________________ If it aint broke rip it apart and find out why

Mar 29, 2009, 10:09 AM	#2
IvanV DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 3,140 Rep Power: 63 System Specs	Re: AIW 9800SE Advice please? If you dislike CCC so much, you have several options (although I don't know when did you use it as you mention that you used to have Nvidia cards; if it were a long time ago, you might find it greatly improved). You may go for an old driver that came with classic Control Panel or for Omegas which would allow you to try to mod the card into 9800Pro (there's no guarantee that the disabled pipes work well, though, so yuo may pass on that since wou probably won't be gaming much on it anyway) or install the latest official drivers without the CCC (just choose custom install). Choosing a 9800 card over a GF4 MX was a good call, ATi's card should have vastly superior video output. On a side note, if the difference you're observing now on the other machine (HTPC) isn't purely subjective (in other words you may be observing the picture more carefuly to make sure that everything is fine and notice imperfections you were missing before) that is very strange as for a few generations all discrete cards have fairly impeccable image quality. PCI-e 1.0 on the motherboard shouldn't be a problem, I believe that only some GF 8800GTs had issues with them (but I think that they simply didn't work). __________________ Feed the porkers and don't touch the buttons!