i have a kt4v-l also but i had troubles with catalyst driver 3.6-3.9. 3.5- and 3.10+ work fine though.

There is one thing thats been overlooked here and that is sound, although its been mentioned on other forums.
Most of the problems seem to be DX9 releted with games that require DX9.
Radeon cards support DX9 but the sound card may only support DX8, so if a game like CoD requires a DX9 compatible sound card than theres a problem.
I have no problem with any DX8 stuff but if I play a DX9 game I have to turn the sound hardware accelleration off and select the lowest sound settings for the game or it will crash.
Not saying thats the answer because there seems to be so many variables but its worth a thought.

Ooops. Need to type first then submit.
I play NFSunderground, which is a Dx9 game, with a SB audigy from a few years ago and haven't experienced any problems.

jonn,
I don't know much about sound and could be totally wrong about the whole sound thing, but NSF Underground dosn't specify that you need DX9 sound in there min requirements as long as your sound card supports DirectSound.

NFS Underground -
MINIMUM SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
===========================
Windows 98, 98 Second Edition, ME, 2000 Professional, XP Professional, or XP Home operating system
Intel Pentium III (or compatible) CPU running at 700Mhz or higher
32MB DirectX 9 compatible video card (Geforce2 or higher) using a supported chipset (see below)
128MB of RAM (256 MB using Windows 2000 or XP)
DirectX compatible sound card
Hard Drive Space: 450 MB free Hard Disk space, plus space for Direct X9 installation.
Sound: DirectX compatible Sound Card8X CD-ROM

but Call of Duty requiers a DX9 compatible card, and mine which is an onboard SIS 7018 isn't DX9 compatible.

Call of Duty -
MINIMUM CONFIGURATION
3D Hardware Accelerator Card required – 100% DirectX® 9.0a compatible 32MB Hardware T&L-capable video card and drivers*
Pentium® III 700 or Athlon™processor or higher
English version of Microsoft® Windows® 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP
128MB of RAM
8x Speed CD-ROM drive (1200KB/sec sustained transfer rate) and drivers
181MB of uncompressed free hard disk space (plus 200MB for Windows swap file)
100% DirectX® 9.0a compatible 16 bit sound card and drivers
100% Windows® 98/98SE/ME/2000/XP compatible mouse, keyboard and drivers
DirectX® 9.0a (not included)

Some one please let me know if i'm barking up the wrong tree.

Guys, make sure you have the latest Windows service packs and DX9b.

I also wish I had found this site before I had bought my ATI 9600 pro, I mean it runs almost all my games pretty damn good except for one I really like to play which is WC3. I seemed to have no problem playing it on my geforce 2 mx, but when I upgraded to my 9600 pro all hell broke loose. I've done all the updating possible still it crashes, I can get into the game fine if I don't touch the mouse but the second I do I end up restarting my system, one thing I know about nvidia is I have never had a problem playing games with them, because before I bought my 9600 pro I had an pny vetigo 5200 ultra 128 ram, but my friend told me to take it back and get the 9600 pro so I did and now im p**sed as all hell because stuff isn't running right. All I have to say is if this doesn't get fixed within a week I'm taking the card back and going with nvidia again and I will never buy an ATI card again.

i recommend you take it back jake. I wish i could, but i can't now

You should get the 9800SE. Stay clear of the 9600 series. My friend has a 9800 and can run everything!!! I have no idea why and deeply regret getting a s**tarse 9600xt

BOO ATI

you take a chance in buyng the 9800se. You could get the 128bit version which performs worse then a 9600 pro but if you get the 256bit version then it will perform as good as a 9600xt and its like $50-$80 more then the 9600xt here in Canada.

Hello everybody!

I'm running with a thoery that the problem is a hardware conflict between this model of card and certain types of memory. If everyone on this thread could tell me what type of memory they have maybe a connection will pop up. I'm thinking it might be something with spd(default) settings on memory sticks. because to fix my problems I had to speed my memory up in the bios by lowering the cas latency from 3 to 2. I'd greatly appreciate all coperation!

Hello Guys

Well, I have fixed my problem.

I have an ASUS A7N8X delux MOBO
AMD XP 3000+
512 DR 3200 - By Crucial
Maxtor SATA HDD
Histech Iceq Radeon9800 Pro

C&C was closing down after about 10 minutes, and so was max Payne 2.
Tried all new drivers, Flashed my BIOS, turned Fastwrite and AGP 8x off... Still didnt work.

So, last night I had another look at the Histech manual for the graphics card. They supply a power cable with three connectors. they say to plug one end into the PSU - with nothing else coming off that connector. Then the other two should go into the HDD and Graphics card.

I re-jigged my power cables... and Voila - no crashes since!!! I have AGP 8x and FastWrite on - and all of the settings are right up for high performance.

Allso - My CPU was overclocked from 2166 Mhz to 2.4ghz... I did this by upping the Multiplier to 14x.
When I changed the power cables around, I decided to reduce the multiplier back down to 13x, which is stock.
That may allso have fixed the problem!

Cheers

HI Guys
Now considering some people are getting fed up wih this lark. Can anyone tell me if there is any real difference between the actual pictures or graphics produced by NVidia or ATI cards. I know about frame rates and so on- what i mean is the results you got on screen. Examples are, vivid or washed out colours, does one make of card create better effects in games than the other and so on. I have no experience of NVidia cards- my past ones were 3DFX 1 and 3 then the very underated but good Kyro 1 cards. Now in the 3DFX days you could either run a game in Glide or D3D, Glide seemed to be the better mode- more colours or better looking pictures and effects. Kyro only ran the games in D3D, but they seemed good.
The point is, besides being loyal, is there really any difference in brands and if not, then ATI haad better get worrying, cos this 9600 Pro mess will take quite sometime to fade from memory.
PS if its main memory that is the problem- how can that effect the card- the card uses its own memory - does't it?

Well I had the vertigo 5200 ultra, which was almost the same as the 9600 pro, except the 9600 pro is a little bit better, BUT I would have easily had the 5200 ultra over that pro because at least I know that the 5200 is compatable with almost any game and more reliable then this piece of s*** ATI...Ya ATI can make good cards but anytime you get an ATI its always a huge gawd damn hastle to get the piece of s*** running right. I pop an Nvidia in and upgrade the drivers and I'm good to go, no lock ups, no bad graphics, no slow downs...god I hate ATI.

Hi
guess that answers the question- if you want reliable- no hassle, no problems- and good graphics- NVidia is your bag. If you want brill graphics blah blah blah and are prepared to wait months for all the problems to be sorted then ATI is for you - plus you must love watching scan disk every ten mins too. ATI hope you read this- cos your next ad campaign had better be f@+&ng good to get people to buy your next effort.
Truth be known, the 9600 Pro was rushed out and some if not all the GPU chips are flakey- plus the drivers are a bit of a mess too.
Regards Twilight

PS no I still use a 9600 Pro, but im not totally happy with the mouse lock up stuff- still its things like this that create brand loyalty.

Hi everybody !

I might have a solution for a few of you who habe problems with their ATI 9600 (XT) Card:
Couldn' t get the card to work, no matter what i did (updated everything, including BIOS).
Then, after changing nearly every value in the AMI Bios, I did a thing i normally would have never thought of.
I reduced my DDR Ram Voltage !!
The default value by the BIOS was 2.7 V. Worked fine with my old graphics card, so I thought i don' t need to change it.
But I reduced it down to 2.5 V (which is a low value indeed), and guess what, I tried out Max Payne 2 (which used to hang up approximately 2 minutes after loading a savegame) and it hasn' t hung up once since then !

Dunno why it' s like that, and I' m still wondering whether it wouldn' t be better anyway to give back the ATI card and take a NVIDIA instead (I NEVER had a problem with those), but maybe it helps some of u.

So long !

Mike Haggar, Mayor of Metro City

Mike,
How did you make the adjustment to the voltage of the RAM? Did you use a third party hack like Rage3D? And does anyone know if there is a way to reset the Radeon 9600 to the way it was out the box. Mine worked for 4 months before it flaked out. Now I get corrupt (very blocky) video in all modes, all levels of boot sequence, all O/Ss. It happens out of nowhere. I can go 2 hours or 15 minutes. The only sure thing is that once it goes South, rebooting is the only way to reset the card.

Thanks
Mark

Hello everyone. I am new here, but I have been looking around researching this problem, and came upon this thread. My problem seems a little different, although related, so I thought I would post it.

My information:
P4 3.2 (hyperthreading enabled)
512 Apacer RAM (dual channel)
Asus P4C800E Deluxe (latest BIOS)
ATI 9600 pro (3.10 Catalyst, tried both ATI as well as Omega)

I get the infinite loop problem (verified by looking at log file generated from error), but mine occurs during the boot up. I get to the black XP screen, and then when it goes to switch to the blue XP login screen, my monitor goes into standby, and the system eventually (after about a minute) reboots. After that, it comes to the "Boot into safe mode if you want" screen, which works just fine (not loading video drivers), If I boot into Windows normally, sometimes the exact same thing happens, but EVENTUALLY, it boots properly (sometimes taking 3 or 4 times of rebooting). Once it boots, everything has been fine. I haven't tried any other games besides Homeworld 2 and Freedom Force (not a huge PC gamer, but looking forward to future releases), but they have worked just fine, and numerous DVD viewings. No artifacts, no glitches, no hangs, nothing ONCE it actually boots. I have changed the AGP voltage from 1.5 to 1.6 and to 1.7, none worked. I have disabled fast writes and everything else mentioned (well, everything I have found looking around, I haven't read all 65 pages here . None of this has solved the problem.

Now, if I go back to Catalyst 3.7, everything works just fine during the boot (no reboots), and everything runs fine in Windows. I would stick with 3.7, but I see some DEFINITE performance gains in Homeworld 2 from using 3.10. I contacted ATI, sent them the information from my error log, etc. but all I got back was the canned "Check our FAQ" response. I thought I would post just to add my info to the information already collected here. I hope nobody minds (after 65 pages, it is a little late for that anyway . .

- burninator

my RAM needs an extra .1 volts over the stock 2.5 to keep the (relatively OK) CAS settings and stability at 171 MHz for PC2700, besides when i underclocked my CPU and RAM i reduced the voltages too and it had no effect on the lockups - not to mention every single setting in my BIOS that would change a voltage/timing/latency.

I believe that those formally filing a complaint have linked to this horrendous list of grievances and been paid a blind eye. Threatening that we take our business to nVidia is not enough. I feel that ATI must incur some destabilizing corporate shame before our issues are redressed. Linking to these grievances indicates no more than 1500 faulty manufacturing samples on the part of ATI - a negligiblility considering how many tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of 9600 Pros have been sold. However, it has been shown that numbers do not matter: years ago when Intel rushed their 1.13 GHz Pentium III, not many samples were made, but they were faulty and this fact was politicized by such sites as tom's hardware (http://www.tomshardware.com), Anand Lal Shimpi (http://www.anandtech.com) and numberous others. These sites made the difference in exposing Intel's scandal. Therefore, we need not contact these sites for tech help, but rather informational help -as we desperately need them to make this 9600 scandal the headline on their multi-million hit websites. Wanting viewership, these sites will surely "tabloidize" this whole thing...

No corporate entity such as ATI should ever ship products with caveat emptor anywhere near them. We may complain that Microsoft holds a monopoly, but at least their products more or less work (excepting virus/hacker resistance) and at least they're American.

In addition, I'd like to note that we have people with systems that have everything from Asus to Soyo. Why not petition these manufacturers and have them speak out against ATI? Surely, to avoid buyer suspicion of them as third party manufacturers, they would like to set things straight.

How many engineers are on the ATI payroll? 100? 500? 1000? You'd think that if half a dozen of them got on the job, that we'd have a fix by now, after 10 MONTHS.

I, like nearly all others on this topic, have shifted from a state of helplessness to rage. We have been marginalized, compromised and discarded by those filthy Canadians. Revenge is not enough.

See I hate this, I shouldn't have to start changing my whole operating system and how things run and different voltages and this and that and this and that just so this piece of crap card works, thats not how things should be done, buy a 180+ card so i can change my whole system around so it doesn't mess up...ya right, heh the only thing I'm changing in my system now is my graphics card, ATI is s**t and always will be.

LOL you bought an fx5200. Thats the biggest peice of junk. Atleast get the fx5600 if your gonna go down the fx line. I'd even rather have a ti4200 then any fx card.

The FX5600s are pretty poor, too. The FX5700 is a decent midrange card, though more expensive than a comparable Radeon9600.

However, you don't see 65-page threads in forums from hundreds of people with GeForceFX cards that don't work properly, or not at all, in 3D.

Omega drivers based on Cat3.10 solved my problems. My card now works fine under Win98SE and Win2K. I'll probably be trying WinXP soon. However, I couldn't recommend the Radeon9600 series in good faith to anyone who wasn't familiar with messing around with drivers, BIOS settings, etc. This thread proves that in many cases even people who are familiar with it still can't get their Radeon9600 card to work. I'll certainly be warning my students (I teach a course on PC hardware).

ATi really dropped the ball on this one. I'll think twice before buying another card from ATi, or perhaps simply not think about it at all.