Battleangel | Personal

The card has been up and running for a couple of hours now. Initially I had some problems with a couple of games (Battlefield 1942, GTA3 etc.) that refused to even load but this went away when I installed the latest Catalyst 3.

A couple of notes so far:

• Many thanks to ATI engineers for making the card so compact.
• The cooler is actually pretty quiet. And it looks cool even though no one will be able to see it. The question is if it really keeps the GPU cool.
• The card consumes a frightful amount of power. 340W PSU is just barely enough but with all the fans I had to install.
• Can be overclocked to roughly Pro speed but I haven’t tried it yet. My CPU is too slow anyway.
• The dual monitor support was difficult to get around. Had to shut it down via device manager. Blunt but effective.
• At first I didn’t experience any stuttering like so many had reported. Now I’m not sure. There MAY be some stuttering in UT2003 and a few other games. See the Rage3d Radeon Forums for more info. The question is if it is the same problem. Maybe .. some people have also reported “microstuttering” which is more accurate. Especially in UT2003 and BF1942 you can see how jerky the panning is, i.e. when you look around. Note that this is not an fps issue. It stutters even at 640×480 with no gfx details.

Here is a small checklist with things to try (I’m halfway through the list and still haven’t been able to fix the jerky gameplay):

• Change the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and ACPI settings to UNIprocessor mode.
• Or maybe fix the stuttering with 3D Analyze?
• Try a fresh set of drivers (duh!) or the Omega drivers from here. Make sure you read the bios guide as well.
• Merge a small registry fix from AMD (LargePageMinimum).
• Go to display properties » advanced » troubleshoot tab and bring the acceleration down a notch. It won’t affect 3d performance anyway.
• Go to device manager and DISABLE the secondary display adapter FORCEFULLY.
• Do a fresh install and apply either Catalyst 3 driver pack. Or remove the current drivers in safe mode and reinstall.
• There are also some issues with AA and Sierra games like Homeworld and Tribes2. Basically some software do not like when AA is forced and there IS a compatibility problem with slightly older games due to nVidia issues.
• When I first installed the card I had a problem with my Yamaha 8424 scsi cdrw locking up trying to read from the driver CD. It was not the CD itself but rather trying to use the scsi bus while probing the Radeon card. Now I experience a rescan of the bus every time I access the advanced display properties. I.e. the drive resets and scans for a new disc. Very strange indeed.

First impression of the card is overall positive. If you are interested you can always read the Rage3D review here. Now I can finally move the G400 to the HTPC as well as get a much needed fps boost.

And talking about the HTPC I also purchased a Pioneer 106 slot-in dvdrom. I have only had time to do preliminary tests with speed control but this drive seems to work ok and the “quiet” mode is actually bearable.

The sad thing here is that my line of Matrox gfx cards is broken. I have actually had one of their cards in EVERY system I’ve built since the dawn of the PC. All in all that includes the Millennium, G200 and G400. Maybe next time Matrox?