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| ASUS RADEON X800Pro to XT | |
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(Review by MS, June 16, 2004) |
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ASUS RADEON 9600XT At: |
Test Configuration
We tested the ASUS RADEON AX-800Pro on the following test system (including comparison with other graphics cards)
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Installation
The original installation of the AX-800Pro went without any problems, courtesy of the mature drivers even in the ASUS GUI
Left to right: Driver and Utilities installation GUI --- Driver Selection --- Utilities Selection
The Control Panel
ASUS, as usual, also changed the GUI of their drivers to reflect the difference in vendor and one of the issues associated therewith turned out to be the fact that after the flashing (and the changed vendor ID), the drivers would no longer recognize the graphics adapter, displaying the error message that no ATI hardware was found etc. Attempts of reinstalling the drivers were greeted with missing .inf file errors. To make another long story short, the simple workaround was to download the latest Catalyst 4.5 drivers that installed flawlessly. We have a few screenshots below of the two scenarios. Note that in the case of the ASUS drivers, the Overdrive tab is missing. The Overdrive shows up, however, in case the Catalyst 4.5 drivers are used and indicate the core speed at 519 MHz. For grins, we flashed the AX-800Pro also to a generic X800Pro BIOS and the Overdrive panel was still functional and displayed the frequency at 472 MHz, which is exactly where it should be.
One thing worth mentioning here is that even after flashing, the drivers / control panel did NOT recognize the modified AX-800Pro as RADEON X800XT but stubbornly maintained the "Pro" tag (see screeenshot header).
An additional caveat on the procedural side of things is that if the "Express Installation" option of the ATI drivers is used after flashing to the XT binaries, the system will get to the desktop but, thereafter, immediately execute a spontaneous reboot. The reason is that the -XT binaries specify the presence of the ATI RageTheater chip and the drivers will look for the hardware and issue a processor fault reset request. The workaround in this case is to install only the display drivers and control panel but not the multimedia devices. After we figured out that part, the rest was smooth sailing.
Next Page: => The Performance Paradox =>
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