Legit Reviews

Yes, PCI videocards still exist!

I bought the 2400 Pro 3 days ago and I got it about 8 hours ago, since then my day has been nothing more but trouble and stress. Therefore I came to this site since I can use all help I can find.
When I got the card, I immediatly uninstalled my old onboard graphics driver and installed my new one. I restarted the computer, let it run for a while and turned it off. Popped in my new videocard and turned
it on again. That's where the horror starts.

As soon as I booted up, my monitor went gothic black. Nothing on the screen. I thought that maybe my videcard was dead so I grabbed another VGA cable and plugged it in the onboard graphics input. So I had my monitor
getting signals from both my 2400 Pro via DVI and from the onboard chip via VGA. At first there was nothing realy strange untill I opened up the control pannel and monitor settings. Since I couldn't read what was on the
screen due to the prehistoric resolution I pushed my monitor a little bit further away so I could read better what was on the screen. Doing so I accidentaly pushed one of the touch buttons on my monitor which caused the
monitor to change input. I noticed that the resolution was at 2048x1152 so I checked monitor settings again and saw that I was using 2 screens at once.

However, I could not get the 2400 Pro to just show me one monitor with a taskbar. So I booted up using my other partition I installed a few days earlier. This partition didn't have any drivers installed yet so I installed
the new drivers for the 2400 Pro and it worked, kinda. I could pimp my resolution up to 2048x1152 (maximum) so I thought everything went well. Downside was, I would have to reboot everytime I want to watch a Full HD movie
because that's what I bought the 2400 Pro for.

When I ran 3D Mark I saw that my scores were still as horrible as the onboard score. I wanted to reboot and noticed I couldn't turn my PC into Standby Mode so I knew there was something wrong with the driver.
I got the newer driver from he ATi site which said: PCI-e but I used it anyway, using it now actualy. It worked just as good or bad as the first one did. I still can't use Standby Mode or watch a HD Movie without blur and lagg.

Since the 2400 Pro isn't the best buy around there isn't much info to find about it. Maybe someone here can help me get the 2400 Pro to work properly because I've had it.

Grtz,

Tom


PS: I know I need to buy a new computer.

Can you disable the IGP on the motherboard via the BIOS?

I'm not sure if the PCI bus has enough bandwidth to be able to push a full HD movie through smoothly.

And if you have other PCI devices in your PC, they are going to be eating into the available PCI bandwidth too.

But try what apop suggested.

Dan

I have a pre build system by HP so the BIOS is pretty simple. I do not have the option to turn the onboard video off but I do have the option to choose which one should be primary.
I have tried to get my card running with primary on "onboard" which didn't work smooth and I tried runnign it with the primary video on "PCI" and this didn't work either. At the moment
my primary video is "PCI" and I do get input via my 2400 Pro but the drivers don't seem to work and it feels like I am still working on my onboard chip but just getting the video trough
my 2400 if you know what I mean... But since I don't think that is possible, my 2400 Pro should be working as t should so I think it's the drivers.

Even though primary stands on "PCI" I get a black screen during boot up when I use the DVI input (2400 Pro), when I switch input to VGA I do see the boot screen but later on it turns
black too but when THAT happens I do get video torugh the 2400 Pro. So my gues is that my computer still uses the onboard chip to boot up since it is not turned off in the BIOS but
it does work as soon as I'm in windows XP because I turned the onboard chip off (disabled it) trough Device Manager.

Maybe someone here knows where I can get a BIOS update in which I CAN disable the onboard chip completely. I have stumbled upon this weird program called BIOS Agent Plus.
I foudn this program on the Phoenix site (Have a phoenix BIOS) but they seem like ripp off motherf*rs to me. I downloaded the trial and the thing said that there was a bios update available
for my system, but hell I aint paying for that.

Another possibility:

I have a 90 Watt PSU which is pretty low. But I thought that maybe I'd be fine since I have a very low power system too and the 2400 Pro draws less then 20 Watts idle, so it shouldn't give
problems during start up since it's not under heavy load.

Anyway, if this could be the case, is it possible I broke my card because I used a 90 Watt PSU, just wondering because I want to be sure it still works properly, I do get video trough the 2400
so I think it's alright.

Let me know what you think.

I have a 90 Watt PSU

there's your problem you'll need to get a better psu ninty watts would be barely enough to run what was in there in the first place and now you wanna add an hd2400pro. regardless of slot type they all draw the same watts ie: pci agp or pci-e hd2400pro will draw the same amount of power