Rococo

First of all, I'm running windows xp pro on a P3 850, motherboard is an asus P3Bf (agp 1.0). The previous card was a voodoo 2 3000 16mb card.

I was hoping to get this thing modded to a 9700pro today, but I can't even get it to work normally!!!

It's a red pcb sapphire 9500 non-pro from all-starshop.com. I first installed the card and used the installation disk provided. it looked as if the installation went smooth, then when I tried to adjust the desktop size, the screen froze with just the cursor showing. I tried rebooting a few times with no luck, until I finally had to restart with the last known working setting.

I then installed the latest driver from the sapphire website and reinstalled. The card worked ok and I was able to resize my window with no problem. I then tried running 3dmark and after a few minutes my monitor would show that it's out of frequency. After rebooting, I'd get the same thing after a few moments that windows was at the desktop.

I know there are many different factors that could be responsible here, but what are some of the more common ones that I can try to solve? If it's a problem with the video card, what can I do to test that it's only the card?

Vanquish

A few questions first, Did you completely remove your Voodoo before trying to install the 9500? Does your mobo support the newer voltages on the cards? also did you try the latest ATI drivers from ATIs site? Do you have the latest BIOS for your mobo?

Anyway, I would suspect that there is a conflict between the drivers of your old card and your new card. So try and uninstall your new card completely, search your comp for all your old drivers, get a Registry cleaning tool to remove all the shit in it, and then reinstall your new card.

If none of this works, then take the card to a friend with a newer comp and try it on his.

Nooze2k

A good website for anything ATI is www.rage3d.com
Check out the forums there for a ton of info on Radeon stuff. I'm a radeon user myself, and this site is a godsend. Yes, it can be biased at times, but what do u get from an ATI fansite? They have some useful utilities that can help clean up stuff. You might want to pick up the latest Catalyst drivers for your vid card as well. Word of warning though, don't download "Built By ATI", you'll want "Powered By ATI" There should be something for Saphire boards as they are one of the bigger OEM companies supporting ATI. I've found that ATI drivers on OEM boards either don't work altogether, or cause weird glitches and instability in games. Hope that helps!

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Nhanced1

Your AGP1.0 board might not have enough voltage running through the AGP bus to support the card properly. Even though it has a hook up directly to the powersupply, the card still depends on power from the slot itself. my suggestion is to shelf this card until you upgrade your entire system and go out and buy a geforce2/3 or equiv, thats more around the time the system that was built. Just trying to be truthful here, but you may never get that newer hardware to work with your older board. Ive had alot of situations alot like this, most likely, there is nothing wrong with your video card. When you have a 9700, or a 9500 for that matter, the bottleneck in playing games and doing anything video related, is going to be that board and chip.

Do make sure to check for driver conflicts as Vanquish said. I have the same sapphire card btw. They make teriffic products and my card softmodded with W1zzards cracked drivers to produce a 9700.

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Rococo

thanks for all the help. Is there any chance that i can damage this card if I keep trying with this motherboard? i've asked on a couple of forums now and phoned several places. Some say I could damage it, others say it will be fine. Anyone here know what the real deal? Anyways, i put my old card back in for now but if it's safe i'd like to try again properly removing drivers this time.

If no luck anytime soon, I'll just have to sell my ass and try to make some quick cash to upgrade the mobo, ram cpu and all that shit.

Vanquish

I totally fried a AGP 1x card by just placing it in my new mobos AGP 4x slot, but that was a stupid mistake on my part (my bro asked me to try his savage 4 and I never thought anything of it) fried the power header on my mobo too so now my comp dont shut off. Anyway I doubt you could seriously damage your card because you have less voltage, not more. AGP 1x cards run on 1.5v whereas the newer cards run on 3.3v, I have never heard of anyone damaging something from less voltage, only lockups or it not posting.

If its not a driver problem, then do as Nhanced1 said You would probably be better off just returning the 9500, untill you upgrade. As he said, it will make little difference in games because your processor / mobo is so slow. Anything over a Geforce 2, would be maxing your bandwidth so theres no point in wasting cash, unless you just wanted to say you did it

Edit: Just found this site, should clarify. http://mirror.ati.com/support/faq/agpchart.html

It said that the 9500 supports 3.3v, 1.5v, 0.8v, but only supports AGP 2x,4x,8x