Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I wasted an ENTIRE day struggling to get this card to work with my Compaq EVO D500. In the end, it came down to a single setting in my BIOS menu -- AGP Aperture. If set to 32MB or 64MB, you get the "black screen of death" i.e. immediately after logging in to XP, the screen goes black and never returns. Inexplicably, if the aperture is set to 4MB or 8MB, the card will let you see the screen, but you wont be able to play any games since you will get DirectX error messages. So legal values are 16MB, 128MB, and 256MB. I have mine set to 16MB since the latter two are wasteful and produce no advantage.
One other tricky thing -- mysteriously, I couldn't even get into my BIOS menu while the card was installed and with the wrong aperture setting. Only when I removed all my PCI cards would it allow me to do so. Bizarre.
I inadvertantly tried both the drivers that came with the card as well as those on ASUS' web site. Both work, but it baffles me that the website version is actually older than the one on disc! The disc version is better because it allowed me to play Bloodrayne 2 with all settings maxed out -- albeit with a distracting interlaced look. The drivers on the ASUS website make the entire bottom half of the game show up as black -- makes it kinda hard to play. So your options are to either turn down the resolution, turn down the detail, or upgrade to the drivers on disc and get interlacing whether you asked for it or not. Oh, and going back to the drivers on disc, the installer hung while installing ATI Parental Control. I killed it but everything worked just fine.
I did not try any of the ATI hotfix drivers that are out there including the new 8.12.
Game playing performance was decent though nowhere close to the top-of-the-AGP-line 3850. The cooling system works. Unreal Tournament runs maxed out and the card never even reaches 60C. The SmartDoctor overclocking software is nice and I was able to push my card from the stock 725/1000 to 825/1150. Could I notice the difference? Not really, but why not use it? Who cares if this card dies in a year. You'll hopefully have a PCIe system by then. Unfortunately, SmartDoctor overclocked settings are reset every time you restart your machine so it's better to use Catalyst Control Center's ATI Overdrive. But I didn't buy this card for gaming, I got it for a rig that will record music, and if you google "Silent AGP," this card is pretty much the last word.
As others have mentioned, the packaging is incredibly wasteful. The box is ridicunormous. It's literally twice the size it really needs to be. Most of the space is used to print the exact same text in 11 different languages. We get it Asus, you're multinational. Since the card requires supplemental power, a molex splitter would have been a useful courtesy somewhere in all that box. Incidentally, while the box suggests a 350W power supply, I've had no problems running mine on a 250.
Bottom line: if you're stuck with AGP and need the silence, this is the card to get. The out-of-box experience is poor, but Asus is not entirely to blame for this since they are simply slapping their giant cooler onto the ATI reference design. Go yell at ATI/AMD!
Click Here to see more reviews about: ASUS AH3650 SILENT/HTDI - Graphics adapter - Radeon HD 3650 - AGP 8x - 512 MB DDR2 - DVI, HDMI ( HDCP ) - HDTV out
No comments:
Post a Comment