I'm thinking of replacing my 9600 pro - any suggestions of what is a similar price/performance card - or any leads to some reviews. Ta

well.. the 9600 XT is coming out soon. Maybe it wont have the problems the 9600 Pro is having. Its just a little bit more then this card and it performs similar to the 9500 Pro and it comes with Half life 2.

Isn't HL2 pushed back to april 2004 ???

oh ya... the XT was supposed to come out soon too but now they have to wait for HL2 to finish I think.

I have the same problems with my radeon 9600 pro (sapphire),
yesterday I installed windows 2003.

Does someone know how to set my agp to 4x, in Windows XP I opened
smartgart and changed from 8 -> 4 in displaysettings, but in
windows 2003, smartgart doesn't open and some options in ATI control panel are not like in XP

ATI don't support drivers for Radeons on Windows Server 2003 because it's not a main stream OS. All drivers for 2003 server are going to be provided through Microsoft.

Crazy

Now i have played C&Cgenerals ,Age of wonders:shadow magic ,ofp wit fdf mod ,3dmark 2001se gave @7450 ,3dmark03 works also ,ufo aftermath works (it's new game) etc.. the benchmarks are terrible but they dont mean **** to me because all games work w.1024*768(i think best wit 17") and they work fast AA2* AF8* wit all games and works like a biach i think the main problem is wit AGP bus at leat 3.0 agp thing needs to be! and newest MB BIOS and drivers for MB after i installed ViA4in1 newest ,card started to work like a dream:9600pro But i have EPOX KRA2+ KT600 maybe card works poorlier wit KT400 MB:s?
These are my thoughts and suggestions propably wont help somebody at all.(seems like card works better wit bigger resolutions & aliasings.. thats weird?) i got HIGHquality settings.

Not true about drivers not being supported under Win 2k3 server, I think the Catalyst 3.8s are Supported, Oh one thing I did this, I Have the ATI All In Wonder 9700 Pro(Same as Radeon 9700 Pro) I sent in my old Radeon 9700 Pro with a report on whats wrong with the Card and they tested the old board and found it defective, oh not to mention not all mobo configurations are compatable with the Same Vid card and such, u should try different mobos, powersupplies and such, not to mention
U should Install Service Pack 1a for windows XP before installing The Vid card and such.

I am Looking for a program where you can adjust your agp-settings,
to change my agp 8x to 4x, I'm working with windows2003, drivers
work, but smartgart and controlpanel don't work so I can't change
It.

You can change AGP settings in the BIOS.

I have some interesting news...

if you've read earlier posts, you'll know that I was able to get my system rock solid if i lowered my bus speed to 125MHz (prior to the 9600 Pro I had 0 stability probs). But at 125MHz, my system was noticeably slower so this was not acceptable. A post a page back gave me an idea ... to try disabling video bios shadowing in the bios. I'm sure many of us looked over this one since it really only applies to really old cards. However, I made this change, put my system back to it's 133MHz bus, and actually OC'ed my CPU. And now I just ran 2 10 min loops of UT2003 benchmark at 1600x1200 and not a single crash! ... before, I couldn't even get through half of one and nothing else has changed besides this setting. I'm gonna keep running these tests and let you know what happens, in the mean time, those of you with problems still should really try this.

That's great to hear.
You should always disable any shadowing, pallet snooping, or bios loading into RAM.
These are artifacts from the days of the 1 meg video card that actually benfitted by these means.
Today they are a waste of BIOS settings, and should be turned off.

Also, try to set your Video memory setting should be set to UC, rather than UCSW. That helps out a bit too.

This may also be helpful.
http://nils.jeppe.de/news/391

Here is what I did:

Disable PnP (In XP Pro right-click on My Computer and choose Manage, it is somewhere under there)

I was able to play Counter-Strike for 90 minutes before I got bored... (vs earlier 5-6 min before hang)

All well and good but audio services depend on PnP, so no sound..
Now if anyone knows how to disable PnP but not sound, speak up!

ok so disabling video bios shadowing definitely helped, but didn't quite do it completely. somewhere around my 4th 10 min loop of UT2003 benchmarks, it crashed. Back to 125MHz I guess. I am really disappointed with this card. And like the guy said in that URL a few posts ago, this card is actually performing slower than my GeForce 1 in a lot of games. What a waste of $200.

Ok for those using windows 2003...ATI's policy is stated here...

http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4227.html

I'm sure you could *try* and use the Cat 3.8s and I'm sure some people have had success with this but getting things like smartgart and things to work will always be difficult.

Crazy

I think generally the rule is that the more powerful a card, the more overhead it's drivers will have and hence you'll need a better CPU. I'd like to see a GF1 card keep up with the Radeon 9600 Pro on a Athlon XP 2400+ CPU.

Crazy

Why should the drivers have any more overhead? If anything, it should offload more functions from the CPU which my old GeForce couldn't do in hardware, and should run faster. I know a faster CPU would definitely help, but I wouldn't consider an Athlon 1.4GHz too slow to handle it. Somehow, I think if I were using a GeForce 4 or FX, things would have definitely sped up at least a little bit on my existing hardware.

I don't know exactly why. From my OpenGL programming experience, I would say because as the card becomes able to render more complex scenes, then the amount geometric information the CPU need to pass to the card increases and therefore requires greater CPU clock cycles (for better image quality of course).

Also have a look at the CPU scability for a top end graphics card:

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030217/cpu_charts-22.html

An Athlon 1.2 Gig only runs 40% the speed of the top CPU.
More CPU scalability information here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030120/index.html

You'll see that higher end graphics cards do much better with better CPUs than with lower end CPUs. These are old benchmarks but I don't see the trend reversing.

Crazy

Thanks for that info, it does make sense. Guess I should accelerate my plans to get that nforce2 and Athlon XP 2500+. I'm just worried that once I do, this problem will be the same or get worse since lowering my system bus speed is the only thing that makes the card stable and going to an even higher bus speed might make the thing go crazy.