Budget AGP graphics cards

[Buleste]

Don't get me wrong the graphics card itself is great. I've had no problems other than it not allowing me to have a resolution higher than 1024x768 although i suspect this is a driver problem. And that is the area i dislike ATi cards the most. If you want the latest and stable drivers for your graphics card then do not use ATi at any cost. Or at least that is my opinion.

[Bloodwych]

Don't get me wrong the graphics card itself is great. I've had no problems other than it not allowing me to have a resolution higher than 1024x768 although i suspect this is a driver problem. And that is the area i dislike ATi cards the most. If you want the latest and stable drivers for your graphics card then do not use ATi at any cost. Or at least that is my opinion.

We all have personal experiences that help us decide what's best and it sounds like ATI's drivers haven't been kind to you! I bought the 9600 late in it's life and had the 5.12 drivers to use on a fresh install after trying the latest bloated ones (although they did work fine).

I've never had a 9550 but from what I understand it has the same core as the 9600. I have just setup an old 8500 for my brother on a 1680x1050 flatscreen monitor using the Catalyst 5.12 drivers mentioned above. It works fine, as does my 9600.

If you can find a driver cleaner for ATI cards it may be worth uninstalling your drivers and installing the 5.12's, but don't blame me if something goes wrong! Windows is always throwing up challenges and conflicts to sort out!

I had some horrible issues with nVidia drivers and my 6800GT, so it just goes to show they're all as bad as one another.

[Harrison]

I can normally sort out any graphics driver issues regardless of the make of card and the drivers being used. Whenever I install new ones I always first boot into safe mode and run a driver cleaner to remove all traces, and then reboot, cancel the auto windows attempt to locate drivers, and then run and install the latest official drivers for a card. Normally works fine with both ATi and nVidia cards, and I have quite a few of both.

I even used to be quite good at getting cards to run when to have a dual monitor setup you needed an AGP and PCI card together in a system. That often took some crossed fingers to make work.

And for a long time I was a fan of ATi cards, buying 9600 and then 9800 Pro cards and I still use both in older machines and they run perfectly.

You mentioned about getting drivers without the Catalyst Control Center. As far as I know you have still been able to do that with all driver versions, even the latest 8.3, where if you look on the official downloads site there is an option to download just the Display Driver, which is what I normally do and that works perfectly well.

The current one can be found at:

http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_ca...=xp/radeonx-xp

[Bloodwych]

Thanks for the link.

What I actually meant was a driver version with the older classic control panel, before it started using .NET and taking several seconds to initialize!

Those drivers are the 5.12's and they rock!

[Harrison]

Oh OK. I do admit I've had some issues with the .net framework on all computers. Nothing to do with graphics cards, just programs complaining that the wrong version is installed when it is and such like.