silentcorner

I picked up an ATI Radeon 9700 Pro video card, something to drive the flat panel display (Samsung 191T) I also bought recently. Last night was my first crack at upgrading that video card.

It started with some system cleanup, made sure I had the latest patches for my WinXP Pro, installed DirectX 9.0, installed new AGP drivers for my motherboard, rebooted into safe mode and uninstalled my detonator drivers (for the existing GeForce3 video card). I was good to go, pop that case open, yank the old card out, put the new in, connected it to the power supply and connected the DVI-I cable from the flat panel. With baited breath I powered on. To my dismay, all that would come up is a screen full of garbage (see picture at right). Great, I think, nothing is ever easy, is it? So the next few hours are filled with multiple motherboard BIOS flashings, combing through message boards, messing with BIOS settings, studying the motherboard manual, and many many video card swaps. To make a long story short, no matter what I did, the display always came up the same…. garbage. And to top it all off, I think my primary CD-Rom drive failed.

So today I will be going back to Best Buy to exchange the card, in hopes (at this point) that it’s the video card itself that is defective. Wish me luck. I’m already seeing now, though, that in my not too distant future, I may start building a new P4 rig, and keep this AMD rig as a backup and secondary testing system (I could have probably saved myself a lot of time if I had another machine to test this card in), since my only other AGP capable system is running the webserver your reading this on. Not to mention, it wouldn’t be bad to have two gaming capable systems handy.