ATI Radeon Drivers?

[Raziaar]

I own a radeon x1950 with 512mb of memory.

I am having issues with drivers lately. I downloaded the latest catalyst drivers, 8.4 I think they are. I saw that AGP was no longer supported, so they released a hotfix for the drivers.

Installing it however, and I could not play any game. I would get less than 1fps on every game. It would indicate 1fps with my ati tray tools, but it was running even slower than that.

So I downloaded another set of previous drivers, catalyst 8.2 and I have them installed. It's working fine, however I am noticing my gpu is now idling at a temperature 6 degrees higher than it was previously. Normally I idle at 57-58 degrees celsius. Now I'm idling at 63-64 degrees celsius.


I was wondering if there is anybody out there who knows the landscape of ATI drivers lately and knows why in the **** ATI stopped supporting AGP cards officially, and what drivers you think would be best for me with my x1950.

 

[CyberPitz]

I've been using Omega drivers rather exclusively for the past many years, and I've got a x1800 atm. Have you tried giving that a shot?

 

[Laivasse]

Raz, I have exactly the same card as you and when I think about the way ATI has supported this card - which is not even old, relatively speaking - words just fail me... I love the AGP x1950 and it's given my aging system a massive new lease of life, but the driver support's almost bad enough to turn me off ever buying an ATI product or remotely ATI-affiliated product ever again.

They released a series of drivers in the mid-Catalyst 7.x's that completely failed to support the AGP version of the x1950 in XP. Not only would it not support it, it has a chance of causing Windows to stop booting entirely (which happened to me and ****ed me to hell), so make sure you have a definitively safe set of drivers as soon as possible in the interests of safety. Such flagrant disregard for their users displayed in such shitty quality testing honestly makes me want to kill something. Why did ATI stop supporting AGP? There's only one possible answer I can think of: because they are lazy, stupid cunts with no idea how to treat their customers properly.

As for working drivers: your best bet is with Omega drivers. From what I remember, the guy who does the Omegas has taken all the recent AGP-****ed Catalyst releases and tweaked them to make them AGP compatible. I'm currently using Omega 3.8.421, which I belieeeeve are based off the Catalyst 7.9's (which were AGP-incompatible), and they work fine, but I'm only using them because I've failed to keep up with recent driver releases, plus I can't comment on whether they'll heat up your GPU or cool it down.

EDIT: BTW Raz, iirc you have the HIS ICEQ 3 version of the card right? I had a problem recently that it had sucked in a TON of dust from the very dusty cottage I'm in atm, since I'd been using my comp for ages with the case left opened up. I've noticed that the design of the cooling system on the HIS ICEQ3 means that it sucks dust into the big plastic casing of the cooler, where it aggregates on the copper heatsinkey bit, reducing cooling efficiency. The problem was so bad it was causing me crash-overheats. Check to see if the same hasn't happened with your card. I had real trouble getting the dust out since I was scared of disassembling the cooler. I used the ink tube of a biro pen to twizzle and dig it out in the end, but you could probably also suck it out with a vacuum cleaner. It gave me an extra leeway of something like 10 degrees celsius and no more overheating.

Edit 2: The Omega drivers also come with ATI Tray Tools, which you can use to up the fan speed for your card if you haven't done so already.

 

[Asus]

I usually have the last driver I used saved. And don't update unless there is a reason, something fixed that was broke before. Because stuff gets fixed and other stuff breaks, that's how driver releases go. Although it's usually game bugs that get fixed/break and not AGP bugs. :\

Omega would be the best recommendation to get updates and have drivers that work around your issue since one of ATI's beta driver testers does the Omegas. 2nd option would be getting drivers from the manufacture of the board (HIS?) since they are the ones who make the AGP version. I don't believe ATI makes a x1950 under their brand with an AGP slot and the x1950 uses PCI-Express natively (meaning a company would need to add an AGP bridge chip on the card for an AGP solution).

Temp increase could be the card is working harder. Driver code stressing the shaders a little differently.
Could be just reading the sensor differently. Or dust.

 

[Raziaar]

Wow Laivasse. Thanks for the post, and yeah I feel the same way you do man.

I do have the HIS version of the card. And I always have my case open(since I don't have enough fans to ventilate my case. I do regularly blow out the dust and stuff that collects on it.

I did try the Omega drivers, but uninstalled them because I was having issues in Faces of War while playing coop with vegeta, which were completely distracting and ended up crashing my computer several times.

So now I'm working with the catalyst 8.2 drivers.



@CyberPitz - Yep, I have used the Omega drivers


@Asus - I need to start taking up that practice Asus, saving the last driver version that was good for me. I always am in the habit of installing the driver and deleting the install.

I'm not entirely sure what could be causing the temperature increase. Maybe it's because I checked the house thermostat and even though it felt cool, it was actually 84 degrees in the house(which I'm usually dying as it reaches that temperature, lol). Today with the AC kicking in, it's bouncing constantly back and forth at 59-60 degrees celsius, which is still 1-2 degrees higher than it was the previous drivers I had installed.

This is all running idle without any programs except firefox opened, at a 50% fan speed with Tray Tools. Same fan speed adjustment profile that I've been using with all previous drivers, so that didn't change.