Not a whole lot to report
here. You slot in the card, you connect up the additional power
feed and you install the drivers. The driver installation was
completely pain free, something I've not always been able to
say about past ATi driver installations.
One reboot later and......oh
yes this brings back memories....a headache inducing 60Hz desktop
that refuses to budge away from 60Hz no matter what you set
the monitor refresh rate too. It'll claim it's running at 100MHz
or 120MHz but you know damn well it isn't!
Fortunately the answer to this annoying problem
is quite simple. Go into the display panel and click the monitor
button. If your monitor is using DDC information deselect it.
Next manually set the maximum resolution and refresh rate. I
played safe and kept to a fairly low 100MHz just to stop the
flicker. Even if the DDC button is grayed out you can manually
select the resolution and refresh rate and this should rid you
of the eye strain.
Here's a look at a few of the driver panels and
what they allow you to tweak :
Direct3D Panel :
The new Catalyst control panels offer a lot more
flexibility than we're used to from ATi. The top slider is great
for those who want a simple way to switch between levels of
performance and quality without having to understand what affects
what. With this overridden the more knowledgeable user can manually
adjust levels of AntiAliasing and Anistropic Filtering. Below
this are two sliders, the top one allows the setting of texture
quality while the lower one alters the level of detail available
while Mipmapping. Unlike NVIDIA drivers the option to disable
VSync is there to use without any registry fiddling.
OpenGL Panel :
No, I've not posted up the wrong screenshot, the
OpenGL panel offers the exact same features and functions as
the Direct3D panel.
Display Panel :
What can I say? This should be familiar to users
of most previous ATi cards allowing you to set up and configure
multiple displays, and of course stop the desktop flickering!
Color Panel :
Likewise the color panel which is carried forward
untouched from previous drivers and allows you to set Gamma
and color temperature.
Options Panel :
The options panel speaks for itself, well it would
considering all the buttons are labeled wouldn't it!
Of course all these pretty pictures of the driver
panels mean nothing if you can't get your Radeon 9700 Pro to
boot, and believe me there are a few situation where this might
be the case. To begin with you've no doubt heard that some AGP
8X chipset motherboards really don't like having the 9700 take
up residence in their AGP slot. One of them is the DFI AD77
Infinity (KT400) we reviewed a short while ago. Unlike some
unlucky souls the AD77 does at least boot and run but the moment
you try to run any hardware accelerated 3D it takes a sulk and
drops you to a black screen that needs the assistance of the
reset button to get away from. Then there's the cold boot issue.
For those of you who haven't heard this basically halts your
system pre-POST with a one long and two short beep video error.
Oh yes I had that one too! The 9700 refused to boot on our Epox
8K3A+ which was running the latest BIOS. I did notice that hitting
the reset button would actually bypass the problem and allow
the system to boot normally but only if you don't hold it in
too long. I'm speculating but it's almost as though the motherboard
is trying to initialize the AGP before the 9700 has powered
up fully and by giving the reset button a quick nudge you reset
the system without the 9700 having chance to drain the juice
from its capacitors. Whether the solution is as simple as introducing
a short delay in front of the AGP initialization procedure I
don't know but I don't doubt the fix is fairly straight forward
(famous last words). What I do know is that it's not PSU related,
I spent far too long switching between four different PSUs none
of which worked only to find every last one of them worked just
fine on the KT400 AD77, well, until I tried to play anything
that is!
The
only thing I'm not over keen on is the fact that the 9700 appears
as two separate devices on your system. This I suppose is as
a result of the dual display facility but it's something I can't
pretend to be keen on.
The
only thing I'm not over keen on is the fact that the 9700 appears
as two separate devices on your system. This I suppose is as
a result of the dual display facility but it's something I can't
pretend to be keen on.