Sapphire 9800 Non-Pro 128Mb - Arrives Tomorrow

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dam6
  • Start date Start date
D

Dam6

Well here goes nothing. A friend upgraded his PC from a GF4 ti-4200 the
other week and after formatting his system because it fell over from putting
a 9600 Radeon in, I must say that I am not looking forward to tomorrow. For
nearly 16 months I have had Win 2k installed at just under 1.2Gb System
install with loads of apps and games on other partitions.

I obviously do not see why I should have to re-install a system because of a
graphics card so I have taken a few precautions:

Downloaded Det Destroyer
Turned off fast Writes in the Bios
Gonna change the Graphics card to standard VGA before restart.
Gonna use the standard drivers that arrive on the CD first.

Will let you know what happens: Fingers crossed.
 
Good luck. It's a great card. If you scrub out all those nasty Nvidia files
and install the latest Catalysts and matching control panel from
www.ati.com, you should come back with only happy tales to tell ;>)
 
Dam6 said:
Well here goes nothing. A friend upgraded his PC from a GF4 ti-4200 the
other week and after formatting his system because it fell over from
putting a 9600 Radeon in, I must say that I am not looking forward to
tomorrow. For nearly 16 months I have had Win 2k installed at just under
1.2Gb System install with loads of apps and games on other partitions.

I obviously do not see why I should have to re-install a system because
of a graphics card so I have taken a few precautions:
Click to expand...

You don;t need to reformat to install a new peice of hardware, unless it's
chipset, and even then you can often get away with it if you approach it in
the right way.
Downloaded Det Destroyer
Turned off fast Writes in the Bios
Gonna change the Graphics card to standard VGA before restart.
Gonna use the standard drivers that arrive on the CD first.

Will let you know what happens: Fingers crossed.
Click to expand...

My process would be:

Change to standard VGA, reboot.
Det Destroy
Turn off
Replace Card
Install Cat3.7 straight off.
Install DX9b

Ben
 
You could always run a repair reinstallation of Windows (it gets rid of
everything in the registry concerning devices in the system, but leaves all
of your files/settings/etc. intact).
 
A little OT, but where did you get the 9800np and what brand is it? I have
seen its sources dry up and increase in price even though they don't have
them in stock (Newegg and Allstarshop). I have one and ordered it just in
time it seems from NE. It is a Sapphire Atlantis and I have it O/C'ed to
350/310 with no problems. Great card if you can find one. I also was worried
about installation and disabled (running XP Pro) my Geforce in device
manager, turned off "restore", wiped out any Nvidia references I could find,
SD, then installed the card, rebooted, then installed drivers from the
supplied CD. They were Cat 3.4 and run fine. Maybe I was lucky, but it
wasn't the nightmare I expected. Of course, I'm still running the Cat
3.4--does that say "chicken' to anyone--I think so.
 
You could always run a repair reinstallation of Windows (it gets rid of
everything in the registry concerning devices in the system, but leaves all
of your files/settings/etc. intact).
Click to expand...


Hi.
forgive me for asking, but how do you do a repair install of WinXP Pro?. I
did have one or two attempts but I got a bit lost. I think I ended up in
the recovery console or something? (A black DOS like screen requiring
command prompts).

If this question is tricky to answer then no sweat, but if its a simple
process then any chance you could enlighten me

Thanks,
 
Boot from the CD. Go as to install the OS from scratch (i.e. hit 'enter' to
begin setup). XP will, then, say 'detected another instance...' etc... It
will prompt you to 'repair' it, or wipe it. Hit the R button.

Follow prompts

-
Wayne Youngman stood up at show-n-tell, in
[email protected], and said:
 
Wayne Youngman said:
Hi.
forgive me for asking, but how do you do a repair install of WinXP Pro?. I
did have one or two attempts but I got a bit lost. I think I ended up in
the recovery console or something? (A black DOS like screen requiring
command prompts).

If this question is tricky to answer then no sweat, but if its a simple
process then any chance you could enlighten me

Thanks,
Click to expand...

Hi,

Just about to buy a 256Mb Gigabyte ATI Radeon 9800 Pro DVI/TV DDR Retail.
just curious what is Det Destroyer?

cheers
 
Hello,

I read reviews all over the shop after looking at www.overclockers.co.uk to
see what they had around £200. It bites that I have to spend that much
money but seeing as it is leagues ahead of the ti-4200 then why not. My
point about re-installing a system was made because the guy with the Rad
9600 had serious errors all over the shop when he installed his card. Even
after a clean install he had to tweak things. He was quite annoyed that he
had to change 'anything'. He still maintains that the GF drivers are great.

I aim to do it right first time. In fact, I'm off next door to see if it
has arrived.

Oh yeah.
 
Strontium said:
Boot from the CD. Go as to install the OS from scratch (i.e. hit 'enter' to
begin setup). XP will, then, say 'detected another instance...' etc... It
will prompt you to 'repair' it, or wipe it. Hit the R button.
Click to expand...

That's how to do it. The bigger question is, why should he do it? Simply
uninstalling the Nvidia drivers (and running Det Destroyer) before
installing the ATI card should work fine without going to all that trouble.
 
John Whitehouse said:
Just about to buy a 256Mb Gigabyte ATI Radeon 9800 Pro DVI/TV DDR Retail.
just curious what is Det Destroyer?
Click to expand...

Detonator Destroyer is a third-party utility used to scrub leftover driver
files from a previous Nvidia card, which can sometimes cause conflicts with
a new ATI card.
 
John said:
Just about to buy a 256Mb Gigabyte ATI Radeon 9800 Pro DVI/TV DDR Retail.
just curious what is Det Destroyer?
Click to expand...

Detonator destroyer... for getting rid of nVidia drivers properly.

Ben
 
Well it's in and I only had to press the reset button once (so far). It
went like this:

1 Install Microsoft .net platform at 19.7Mb (Required for Det Destroyer)
2 Uninstall Detonator Nvidia Drivers (Restart)
3 When back in Windows Cancel the request to install new drivers
4 Run Detonator Destroyer.
5 Shutdown
6 Install the card. Same size as my Ti-4200.
7 Start PC and when in windows install drivers. I DID install the
Control panel. Not Hydravision. Installed DX after restart.

Done.

So far Unreal Tournament has locked the PC so I have uninstalled it. Tried
to tell UT that I had a new card. Serious Sam2 no longer worked so i
uninstalled that as well. Will re-install later on. UT2003 still has the
'meant to be played' Nvidia logo. That is funny. Now I have to tweak this
and that.

So no other problems... but the card has only been in for twenty minutes.
Impressed. Hang on, I will just run a few tests.

Unreal T 2003: Flyby: 151.60 / Botmatch 53.86 / 1024*768 res
3D Mark 2003: 4634. Is that crap?
3D Mark 2001: 11937

AMD Athlon XP 2400+
ECS K7S5a MB
1Gb PC2100 DDR mem
3 x 7200Rpm 8mb HDs
Herc Game Theater XP Sound
3 x Case Fans - Love that noise.
400Watt PSU
Windows 2000 SP4 etc: 1.21Gb C Drive. Owww

As long as there are no other problems I must thank ATI for making a great
card. Nice. Now, anyone got any tweaks i can use? I never received the
Redline tweaking software for some reason? Not important as the card is
fast anyway.
 
Well here goes nothing. A friend upgraded his PC from a GF4 ti-4200 the
other week and after formatting his system because it fell over from putting
a 9600 Radeon in, I must say that I am not looking forward to tomorrow. For
nearly 16 months I have had Win 2k installed at just under 1.2Gb System
install with loads of apps and games on other partitions.

I obviously do not see why I should have to re-install a system because of a
graphics card so I have taken a few precautions:

Downloaded Det Destroyer
Turned off fast Writes in the Bios
Gonna change the Graphics card to standard VGA before restart.
Gonna use the standard drivers that arrive on the CD first.

Will let you know what happens: Fingers crossed.
Click to expand...


I've nothing useful to add here, but I'm going to be picking up a
Radeon 9600 Pro in a couple days, and wasn't looking forward to a hard
drive wipe either-- Can anyone here breifly explain Det Detroyer and
where I can dl it?
 
It's all very easy. my friend with his 9600 and re-installed OS said that
he never used Det Destroyer and that 'could'.... have been why things fell
apart.

One thing to mention: My CD-Rom drive just failed. It was directly linked
to the power connector on the 9800. My power requirements are quite high
with 3 case fans, one side panel fan with lights and 3x hard drives. I have
disconnected the side case fan and moved the power from my CD-rom to a hard
drive. (That's one lonnnggggg cable from the 9800!)

400Watts.... Damn I need more power. Or less hard drives. I now have no
games to stress this 9800 beast of a card. Dammit.
 
Reinstalling those games should fix you up, they just didn't know you had a
real 3D card ;>)

Your scores are respectable. You might squeeze out a little more by
overclocking the card. Spend a little time in the tweaking forum at
www.rage3d.com to learn how to max everything out.

Enjoy.
 
Your benchmark numbers are quite similar to what I got with 4xAA and 8xAF.
With UT2003 I found that renaming the UT2003 ini file forced UT to create a
new one for my 9800 pro. I was amazed at the default graphics settings when
I restarted UT. Almost everything at max. Very nice.

JK
 
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