Well, I RMA'd my card and got it back (was shipped back overnight FedEx at no cost to me!) and it's all good, but now I have another issue. I was just looking at the driver settings for the card, and noticed that the AGP speed setting (choices of Off, 4x, 8x) is set to Off. If I turn it on and reboot, the driver sets it back to Off. The board supports it; I checked the BIOS and the option is set to 8x there. Is this connected in any way with my RAM speed? it's PC2100 DDR. CPU is P4 2.26GHz 533 bus. Any ideas here? Thanks.

I'll defer this one to my son. He is more up on graphics cards than I.

that agp setting doesn't affect your system ram speed. all it does is affect the speed at which the card communicates with the rest of your system. 8x is pretty much the standard for todays high end cards, it is the fastest setting available for agp, and will most likely be the last. with pci-ex around the corner there is no need to ramp it up anymore.

 

i'm not sure why your driver is saying "off" though. it should say at least 4x, and even 8x. the 9600 supposrts 8x agp so thats not the issue. there's not going to be a noticeable performance increase between the 2 either. even most of the newer high end cards are just now taking some advantage of the 8x speed.

 

i assume since it says it's at 8x in the bios it really is. i asume you're talking about the smartgart tab in the ati control panel too. what driver version are you running? you may want to try a newer set, see if that fixes things.

 

are you noticing any performance issues?

there's not going to be a noticeable performance increase between the 2 either. even most of the newer high end cards are just now taking some advantage of the 8x speed.

 

Really, I wasn't aware of that. I was using version 6.14.10.6444 then I saw that a newer one was released just this past day so I installed that; same problem. But no, I don't really see any performance issues. Odd thing though that it would say off.

Well, some reading on the ATI website prompted me to update the motherboard AGP drivers. So I headed over to the Asus site and grabbed the latest ones and installed them. Problem solved. The speed in the settings is now set to 8x. Only thing is fast write is off, which the board is also supposed to support... *shrug*. Thanks for the insight.

fast writes do little to nothing for performance gains, infact enabling them will most likely break something. i'd suggest keeping fast writes off anyhow. keeps the system more stable, and like i said, they're basically useless.

Oh ok, thanks.