Margie’s been having regular fits with her current Nvidia GT 220 video card — or, more properly, the drivers thereof. As she is a regular reader of the Nvidia forums, she’s well aware of all the ins and outs of what’s going on, and can remove and reload drivers (including the latest-greatest beta ones) at the drop of a hat.
Basically, her machine just keeps black-screening in the middle of games, esp. video-intensive scenes, in LotRO and CoX (she hasn’t bothered with STO of late). Driver changes and settings tweaks and following up on all the hairbrained suggestions from the forums hasn’t solved it, but it has given her a lot of extra gray hair (which, I hasten to point out, looks quite distinguished on her).
Sooooo … she’s looking at buying something new, and, disgusted with Nvidia driver-craft, she’s shifting over to ATI.
The current front-runners are in the ATI Radeon 5770 (maybe the 5850, if she can justify the price differential).
Two basic questions — three, maybe.
First, given that she only runs one monitor, and the nature of the games she plays, is anything over the 5770 really overkill?
Second, the three brands she’s looking at with the Radeon 5770 are the XFX, Sapphire, and MSI. Anyone have any particular personal opinions on those brands?
Finally, how the heck can you tell the difference between the versions of the same card from a given manufacturer? Even going to the manufacturer’s site — e.g., the XFX site at their various 5770 offerings — they all look different but the functional difference is unclear.
Any suggestions, guidance, or 1337 skillz advice would be more than welcome.
1. If the price difference isn’t a barrier, I would look at the 5800s. If you can get a card that supports DX11, you will be happy when your MMOs add support for it. DX10 made a big difference in LotRO’s graphics, and DX11 should be at least as significant.
2. I’ve had good luck with Sapphire, but that doesn’t mean the others aren’t better. :/
3. Looking at the 9800 cards on the XFX site, I see typically one difference on each model, such as RAM type, clock speed, or bundled game.
I suspect this isn’t much help. 🙁
I’m not much help, even though my current video card burned out this week and I had to buy a new one: I got a NVidea GTX 260. I’ll probably always buy NVidea cards for the mirror-world version of Margie’s reason: I had a series of bad experiences with ATIs back in the dawn of time, and it’s made me gunshy.
I understand Margie’s frustration, though. In diagnosing my problem with my previous card, I had to locate 64-bit drivers for a slightly older 8800 GeForce… it wasn’t at all fun.
WITH ALL THAT SAID: I would recommend going to Microcenter (first exit off 225), walking back to the video card area, and asking questions. They can explain things like why the card I got (856 megs of video memory) is justifiably 100 bucks more more than the card right next to it with 1 gig of memory.
I occurs to me that Margie’s problem probably isn’t the drivers, at least judging from my own card problems this week with an NVidea card; the card probably just fried.
What that meant, in my case, is that the card functioned just fine as a high-resolution VGA card (the system even recognized it as the proper model of card), but Win7 disabled the drivers on boot up, because the card wasn’t responding properly.
Which means that the machine looked almost totally fine until I wanted to run any game at all (even something like Wizard 101), because they need to talk to the video card using the native driver language of the card, and they couldn’t.
Anyway: my point is that Margie might have gotten the correct drivers days ago, but if the card is dying, it wouldn’t matter. I go so far as to say that’s *probably* the issue.
I was having this same issue with P-Kessa’s machine– an Asus CG5270 with the GT220 card. The card worked fine for the first three months, but developed an issue where we would get black screen errors during gaming, or even normal use. This would happen at any moment, and was constant for over a month. There seemed to be neither rhyme nor reason to what would trigger the issue.
The machine was bought at Best Buy. I was…disappointed at their technical responses and customer support.
After a good deal of research, using the computer model as part of the search, I found many complaints that duplicate this one. The best solution I was given was sand all the existing drivers off the machine and to load and use the 195.62 drivers, dated 11/26/09.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_195.62_whql.html
Since I installed these drivers, about 5 months ago, the card has been free of this issue. (This is not the best solution, but after upgrading to the 196 drivers, I’m gunshy about setting the machine up again.) If Margie’s card worked well for a time, and this issue can be traced back to a video driver update, it might be this simple.
Hope this helps.
If you are looking for a new card, you may also want to check out the reviews at http://www.tomshardware.com/us/. I’ve found some good information there.
One other note:
We had this problem on two different computers of this model– the one originally purchased, and the one that was (eventually) issued as a replacement.
Interesting I also have ASUS CG5270. Since I am a pro now at uninstalling and reinstalling drivers. I will try that tonight.
Ran CoX for a while last nit with the new/old 196 drivers. No crashes, but will have to test some more 🙂 I have had periods of 0 defects after some other fixes, only to recur later.
Hope it continues to work…
(Just be careful when running updates for the computer. It may want to serve you up a video driver update with the other stuff.)
LotRO will soon be supporting DX11, so I’m probably going to switch from two Radeon HD4850s to a single HD5850. Wondering, as you did, about the different manufacturers, I found this page:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/278621-33-what-differences-manufacturers-radeon-5850
The consensus seems to be that they’re all good, so I will look for the lowest price. I don’t suppose I will be able to bridge a 5850 and a 4850.
You in the market for a used 4850? 😉
OK, I just ordered an XFX Radeon HD5850 from NewEgg for $279.99. Not only was it the least expensive one, it comes with a free 8GB flash drive if you order by 6/20. 🙂
I replaced my two Radeon 4850s with a 5850 today, and my framerate in LotRO jumped from 63 fps to 113 fps!
I now have two spare 4850s…
~blows off the dust~
So, ever get Margies computer fixed?
I rolled back the drivers to 195.62 It worked fine before vacation, but last night after a few hours in s special test environment, I crashed. Think it’s time to buy that new graphics card. It would be fun to have it on Sunday to show off. 🙂
I’m pretty certain my position on the subject is “I will do a George Jetson in front of Best Buy for you, my love.”
~boggles~
I am not sure I even want to know what a “George Jetson in front of Best Buy~ is. =P
Yeah, I we can show off STO stuff and the new pretty on CoX.
Swing by in the car and hand her my wallet as she exits …
Ahhhh, gotcha! 🙂
I thought it was, “Margie, stop this crazy thing!”
I take it you don’t want me to send you one of my now-spare Radeon HD 4850 cards? They’re just taking up closet space.