Rich Heimlich wrote in message . ..
Guys,

Bit of a surprising update.

I also happen to have a Radeon 8500 here that the Radeon 9800 Pro
replaced. Not sure what this tells me but the results are VERY
interesting.

I decided to try and eliminate the 9800 Pro as a problem by installing
the 8500 and re-installing the drivers. I'm using the Omega drivers
but once XP sees you have a different card it will force a re-install
even though they're unified drivers.

I did all that and the system is up.

I then decided to run 3DMark 2001 as it's a DX8 benchark and the 8500
doesn't do much with DX9 as I recall. So I run the benchmark.

Recall that the 9800 Pro gave me a score around 9400 and clearly that
was well low.

Well, the 8500 is giving me a score of 10518.

Does that pretty much point the finger at the video card?

I'm also wondering about the power supply. It's an Antec True Blue 430
watt supply. I had been a PC Power and Cooling fan forever but
switched to this with the new system as it was handy.

Thoughts? I'd hate to go about replacing the video card only to find
it's the power supply.

And, does this test of mine really even tell us anything?

It might be a virus, thought it would hard for a virus do descriminate
between 8500 and 9800.

So the most possible cause is that AGP doesnt work correctly when you
put Radeon 9800. If you havent have any crashes with 9800 plugged in
then 99% it isnt a power problem.

Run Dxdiag and check at the display tab that AGP acceleration is
enabled. If not, remove all ATi drivers, reboot, install your
motherboard chipset drivers and reboot. Then install ATi drivers,
reboot and run dxdiag again and check. Also from the smartgart tab of
ati check whether agp is on and at which speed.

It might be the horrible case that this combination of motherboard and
radeon9800 cant cooperate to AGP bus.