9700 pro

rainmx · Feb 26, 2003, 10:17 PM

Hi i have a question i had made my mind up on getting
a radeon 9700 pro but a friend tells me that the drivers
are very incompatable with almost all operating systems
and would probably give me nothing but grief
any advice from 9700 Pro owners?

Thanks

CherryPopper · Feb 26, 2003, 10:35 PM

Oh well..... I guess if they're not compatible with any operatin system then you probably should'nt get one

edperks · Feb 26, 2003, 11:12 PM

Your friend must be talking to hear himself talk , The card rules from everything Ive read and seen on my nephews machine. I just havent had the doe lately to purchase one but I will be soon. If you have the doe get it!! you will not be unhappy with it at all.

Necrosis · Feb 26, 2003, 11:36 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by rainmx
Hi i have a question i had made my mind up on getting
a radeon 9700 pro but a friend tells me that the drivers
are very incompatable with almost all operating systems
and would probably give me nothing but grief
any advice from 9700 Pro owners?

Thanks

Hmm....yeah first thing your friend doesn't know what he/she is talking about. Secondly just read around here to find out the status on ATI's drivers. I don't want to say go buy one and it'll be 100% no problems. Please list your complete specs. and we will go from there to root out any problems you may have.

Dmac43 · Feb 26, 2003, 11:53 PM

Your friend sounds like a closet NVIDIOT... I have the 9700 Pro, and the 9500 Pro running in 2 of my machines and have had ZERO issues with them.. Omega has tweaked the latest drivers (which worked great) and made them even better... BTW my 3d mark scores kick the crap out of people using similar systems with NVIDIA cards...
One thing to consider, befor buying any of the newer generation cards either Nvidia or ATI, make sure you have a high quality power supply of at least 300 watts (thats 300 watts for a good brand name supply, probably more like 500 watts for an el-cheapo special) as these cards get their power directly from the powersupply now, not from the AGP port...

dipstick · Feb 26, 2003, 11:56 PM

Deifinitely don't listen to your buddy. You will love a R9700

Forge · Mar 10, 2003, 12:55 AM

Your buddy is either an Nvidiot or he's jealous because he couldn't afford a 9700. If the cards had problems on nearly every OS, it makes you wonder what the Hell the over 1 MILLION R300s sold are doing these days.....

9700 OS, the only place R300 cards work?

Desert_Siege · Mar 11, 2003, 12:04 AM

I have only had one issue and I am not sure that its not something that I did while "tweaking" and that is with Hitman 2 and strange black flashing blocks on maps with snow and shadows or very light surfaces and shadows. Other than that this card is AWESOME! The 2D desktop quality is better, text is clearer and from all the games I have seen and played, my 9700 Pro with 2X AA looks better than all the Nvidia cards I have seen running 4X AA. If you want your games to play fast and look good doing it, you won't be sorry. I think your friend might be trying to look out for your best interest but doesn't have a clue as to the rapid improvement in ATI hardware and software over the last 18 months. I was a skeptic too, but after reading alot of posts here and reviews in other places and actually seeing it first hand in a friends machine, I gave up my old Ti4400 and made the switch to the 9700 and haven't looked back, but I am sure if I did, my old Ti4400 is somewhere back there.........WAAAAAYYYY back there

This isn't the same friend who told you that MAC's are kewl is it? j/k

WarFlail · Mar 11, 2003, 08:26 AM

I'd *like* to say that the 9700 Pro is completely stable and bug-free but that has not been my experience. And if you read around this and other forums, youll find that I am not alone. In the 3+ months that I have owned this card, it has proven to be the most unstable graphics adapter I have ever owned, not to mention the most expensive.

The two problems I have encountered time and again, regardless of which drivers are being used, are these:

1. While in a 2D environment, the system crashes due to an "infinite loop" or "stuck thread" error, causing the system to reset to 640x480 Safe Mode until rebooted. Sometimes this happens for no reason at all, but most of the time it's caused by something as innocuous as a mouse click, incoming ICQ message or Internet Explorer opening a page. Because Windows XP recovers from this crash, no data is lost, just some inconvenience from having to reboot.

2. While in a 3D environment, such as in Direct3D or OpenGL games, the system completely locks up, although sound continues normally. Either the screen goes black and the monitor goes into standby mode, or the frozen image stays on screen. Only a hard reboot can get out of this problem.

Through the generous assistance of people on this forum and Rage3D, I managed to fix the second problem by using PowerStrip to change the AGP transfer rate from 8X to 4X. There is no noticeable loss in performance, and there hasn't been a screen freeze since.

Unfortunately, the 640 Drop Out still occurs from time to time, sometimes at least once per day, other times just 2 or 3 times a week. The side effect of this crash is that it shuts PowerStrip down to prevent it from potentially adding to the problem.

The problem does not seem to be restricted to my type of motherboard (Granite Bay), its BIOS or the card's drivers. Given that other people with 9700 Pros of different revision numbers (mine is 1.0) have suffered the same problem, I think it's safe to assume that it isn't a problem with my card. I have an excellent true-power PSU so it's probably not a voltage issue either. The graphics card is also not sharing its IRQ with any other device so it isn't a sharing/conflict issue. The 640 Drop Out appears to be an interface problem between the graphics adapter and Windows, which means that it is a software problem that might be rectified by a newer set of Catalyst drivers or perhaps an update from Microsoft.

I am sure this is something that will be ironed out in due course. Aside from this fairly serious issue, the card is awesome and image quality and colour reproduction is the best I've seen.

Regards,

-=W=-

MSX · Mar 11, 2003, 12:49 PM

So you never owned a GeForce 2? Or any of the MX line WarFlail? They get my vote for most unstable cards...

Anyway, really you should probibly rma or flash the bios on your card. 1.3 fixes the agp8X issue on most boards. The agp8x versions of the Geforce Ti line are having issue too, but much fewer to be fair.

Are you going to have problems with the 9700Pro? Well, its worth the gamble. The card is definatly boss.

~~craig588~~ · Mar 11, 2003, 04:00 PM

Well if you really wanted to get technical.... well I guees you dont but I will anyways

The ati drivers are very incompatable with most operating systems, they dont work with dos 1 all the way to dos 6.22 (thats like 20 os'es right there) they dont work with windows 1 through 3.51, they dont work too well with linux, they dont work on unix, they wont work on terminals, they dont work on katana, they dont work on whatever os the XBOX uses, they dont work on unix, they dont work on freeBSD, they dont work on lindows, they dont work on texas instruments operating software, they dont work on palmOS, they dpnt work on BeOS, they dont work on os/2, they dont work on atheOS, they dont work on windows CE, they dont work on mac OS 1 though X, they dont work on minix, they dont work on macminix, they dont work on...............

I could go on forever, but in reality if you have windows 9X, XP, or 2K you will be fine. It might be good to note that 99.999999% of all drivers wont work on all of those operating systems either.

EDIT:fixed a few names

shuki · Mar 11, 2003, 04:05 PM

WarFlail, did you give that hefty investment and clean OS install?

and I've have me r9700 for about 2 mos now and haven't had problem one with it. Well, OK. It won't do anything over 185 fsb for me

But other than that, came up beautifully from an r8500 without a hitch...

***Veridian3*** · Mar 11, 2003, 04:39 PM

Rainmx, the 9700pro is a great card. Excellent image quality, fast and stable. I have no driver problems. And any that i have experienced (say, with a new game) have been fixed in the next release.

WarFlail, check your PM.

Stu

toddsmack2k · Mar 11, 2003, 11:39 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by craig588
Well if you really wanted to get technical.... well I guees you dont but I will anyways The ati drivers are very incompatable with most operating systems, they dont work with dos 1 all the way to dos 6.22 (thats like 20 os'es right there) they dont work with windows 1 through 3.51, they dont work too well with linux, they dont work on unix, they wont work on terminals, they dont work on katana, they dont work on whatever os the XBOX uses, they dont work on unix, they dont work on freeBSD, they dont work on lindows, they dont work on texas instruments operating software, they dont work on palmOS, they dpnt work on BeOS, they dont work on os/2, they dont work on atheOS, they dont work on windows CE, they dont work on mac OS 1 though X, they dont work on minix, they dont work on macminix, they dont work on...............

I could go on forever, but in reality if you have windows 9X, XP, or 2K you will be fine. It might be good to note that 99.999999% of all drivers wont work on all of those operating systems either.

EDIT:fixed a few names

HAHAHAHA

BWX · Mar 11, 2003, 11:49 PM

Get the 9700pro and don't look back. Tell your friend he doesn't know jack. If I had the cash I would have one right now, I gotta wait a month or so tho.
I follow almost every bit of graphics card news and the only thing I would say is that you MAY want to wait a while for the 9800 pro to come out first. Either to buy it, or for IT to drive the 9700 pro's price down a little bit. Either way you will be a happy camper. The 9700 pro is a powerful card, and well worth the price.