Hello for everyone!

Just a guess, but could everyone send in that which manufacturer is his card from? (Sapphire, Club3D, Connect3d, ATI, MSI, Gigabyte...) Maybe one of them could see this problem(s) in the factory and was able to solve it. Actually I'm really interested in that how the Club3D cards perform, because I want to buy one.

don´t buy! my card is a club3d. it does not work!

does anybody have experience with ATI 9600 Pro and KT266A (MS-6764 / KT2 Combo-L: VIA KT266A Chipset, Sound, LAN, USB 2.0, FSB266, ATA133, 1 AGP, 6 PCI, 2 DDR)

Mine is a Built By ATI (boxed) 9600 Pro 128MB bought in mid Sept.

Gigacube Radeon 9600 Pro 256Mb, works in Cat 3.2 (supplied drivers) but no others.

Crazy

Gigacube Radeon 9600 Pro 256Mb, works in Cat 3.2 (supplied drivers) but no others.

Crazy

never heard of club3d... anyway mines a built by ATI but I dont think its different manufacturers that make bad cards. Seems like ive heard every 9600 pro brand have troubles in this thread. sapphire, built by ati, powercolor, club3d. I'd recommend to all of you getting either sapphire or built by ati if your going to buy an ATI card. Other names usually come with cheapo ram and not as good overclocking cababilities.

Well the one good thing about the Gigacube Radeon 9600 Pro 256Mb was that it came with 250Mhz RAM even though it was clocked at default at 200Mhz. So I could overclock somewhat, at least to 244Mhz without problems.

It softened the blow you feel when you realise the 256Mb card is not clocked at the same speed (300Mhz) as the 128Mb version.

Quality of non-ATI brands do vary but the problem is that ATI only sells in north America, leaving the rest of the world to the "powered-by" brands.

Crazy

Funny until I read this posting I thought I had a bunk card. My previous card "gForce 4 MMX" ran fine with my mother board (DFI Lan Party NF II Ultra) and operating system (MS ME). But as soon as I bought and installed the ATI 9600 Pro the stability went to hell in a hand basket. I couldn't keep the machine up for more than 10 minutes at a time before it crashed. After many hours of trouble shooting I decided that the problem was my OS and decided to upgrade to MS XP. That seemed to solve the stability problem, but I noticed an extreme drop in my bench mark scores. After doing some more digging I found that AGP aperture was set to 4X which would explain the benchmark discrepancies. However, every time I tired to set the AGP to 8X the system became unstable and XP would reset to the lower 4X setting.

So, the question is "Who is responsible, the ATI 9600 Pro or the nVidia Chipset that governs the board." Personally I don't really care; I just want the speed that I paid for with the stability I can count on. I would have to agree with the letter above and will be posting a letter to the “Guard dog” at Maximum PC.

The reason for the drop is performance is probably NOT due to your AGP being set to 4x. That will cause a small decrease in performance but not that much that is noticable in games.

What benchmarks did you use? Also, did you check you have it on AGP 8x in WinME or did you only notice it was on 4x afterwards?

For my part, I used to have a dual boot of 98se and win2000. I used the 98se just to play games because in the old days I used to notice a 5-10% drop in benchmark scores but more like 15% drop in performance in games going from 98se to 2000. This was pretty much standard (at the time) and I'm sure ATI has improved upon the situation since I had that set up (over a year ago).

I had a Radeon DDR (original radeon) in those days and used to notice that the games were not only slower but also not as smooth in Win2000 compared to 98se. But that seems to be resolved with the Radeon 9600Pro.

PS Windows ME was a crap OS which was unstable anyway. Steer clear of it.

Crazy

ya stay away from windows 2000, stick with 98 or xp pro. what OS did you have before? i heard windows 98 is best for gaming but I noticed better scores with XP pro.

My first benchmark was Aquamark 3d, with ME I scored 27,325 with XP the score dropped to 17,223. Then I switch up to 3Dmark 03, again ME scored well with 3407, but XP showed at 3205. I am pretty sure that the AGP was at 8X with ME, but I know it is 4X in XP and when you try to bump it up to 8X it takes a nose dive. Don't get me wrong, I do like the ATI but I would just like the stability thing to be taken care of. It would seem that I am not the only one experiencing the problem.

does your mobo support 8x? Check to see if all your AA AASF set off too.

Michael Scrivo and the others,
Got my new mobo today, asus a7n8x deluxe rev 2.0 .
My 9600 pro runs great now on 8x agp , so far it didnt crash.
I will keep you updated!

Im very close to sending this damn card back (9600 PRO 256MB) ...it wont finish any benchmark tests and it freezes when you start to play a game in vietcong....it will sit there and work untill u move the mouse...must be some overload on graphics or some s**t..... i've tried all drivers...nothin works. before this card i had a geforce 2pro which played every game superb with no freezes or problems.

whats goin on?

ok this is a reply to my post above.....i've been messing around with vietcong settings and the only time the game will freeze or shut off the monitor is when the "Disable DXTn Lightmaps" box IS checked. however when this box is not checked the game will freeze everytime.

That sounds nice, all of it.

but same problem exist.

my card is a piece of s***!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It´s a club3d card. if you nerver heard, so on! I´m p**sed!

I ain´t got the money to buy a new MB.

These guys at ATI don´t care about problems are listed here!

ok .....another fix i've done.......in the 3dmark 2001 test i have been able to get through all of them by taking off "Compressed" on Texture Format and putting it on 32 bit.....it now will complete the tests BUT I got some s**tty 8200 score.......why is this score so low?

compressing the textures gives better performance, so unchecking that option will give you a performance decrease.

Robert: Your score drop from 3400 to 3200 is exactly the sort of drop I would expect in performance going from WinME to WinXP. At least what I used to experience.

Oh and Windows 2000 it great, it's window Millenium Edition that sucks.

Your drop in Aquamark sounds like a driver issue. Did you install your chipset driver BEFORE your graphics card?

If your confident the system is stable at AGP 8x, then you can try and uninstall the Smartgart utility (check ATI website for "smartgart uninstall utility") and just force the setting from the BIOS. Check if that works. Try older catalyst drivers but really, there's no way just going from AGP 8x to 4x will create that sort of drop in performance.

Tom: Disabling Texture Compression puts more pressure on your memory bandwidth will relieving the GPU of some of it's burden. DX8 games are already memory hungry so removing texture compression will only reduce the performance.

But thinking about it a little you'll realise that doing that is much the same as reducing AGP to 4x or other solutions to our problems, which seems to me that the 9600 Pro is running on very tight constraints and that when it's running at the maximum it can fail. I don't know what to do about it though.

Crazy

I'm having the same damn prob with this card (ive got a 128), any news on when ATI maybe fixing this? Or will I have to send the card back.....I cant do without playing some of these games