Mac RumorsTweakGuides.com. Well removing the ATI Catalyst 4.12 allows the machine to boot. I went to safe mode and whacked it and now it seems fine. I deleted all the drivers and will try a reinstall. Wish me luck.
Also will try out the Omega drivers as well to see how that goes.
*unofficial* ATi Troubleshooting guide. _OK I think I may have found what’s wrong with Calvin’s machine. Sounds a lot like video drivers. Here’s a note from someone who is using the same Chaintech VNF3-250 and ATI Radeon 9700s so close to his 9800. I’ve had the system fail to boot because of the video driver. Worked semiwell with the 6/04 drivers, but the new 11/04 Catalyst 4.12 have been a disaster. Here’s another writers experience, it has to do with the nVidia AGP driver conflicting with the Catalyst drivers._
I would experience lock-ups, crashes and blank screens, usually needing a reboot. As I am sure you all have, I have tried every driver ever made by ATi. I have tweaked every BIOS setting (8x, 4X AGP, fast writes on, fast writes off, hypertransport 1X, 2X, 3X, 4X, resetting frame buffer sizes in games, resetting video memory in the BIOS, etc.) Tweaking these settings and changing drivers have worked to varying degrees, but never truly solved the problem.
It is to use a combination of the 3.9 Catalyst driver (using Omegas based on the 3.9’s might even be better) and UNINSTALLING your AGP / GART driver from your system. My GART driver is an nVidia AGP driver.
Is it nVidia sabotage(?), I don’t know, but I read VIA Hyperion AGP drivers caused the same type of problems with ATI video cards. By right clicking on “My Computer”, going into the Device Manager and then System Devices, you will see ” nVidia nForce 3 250 AGP Host to PCI bridge ” Right click on that and uninstall. It will prompt you to reboot. Upon rebooting, if it redetects it and askes you to install it again, obviously don’t, but it shouldn’t ask you to install it again, anyway.
Your ATi video card drivers will not detect an AGP setting (either 4X or 8X)
nor will you be able to enable Fast Writes, as you now do not have an AGP driver installed to allow you to do this.
No matter, because AGP settings are a lot of “hooey” based on impractical theoretical bandwidths anyways (anyone notice a difference in PCI-e video card benchmarks compared with their AGP counterparts? I didnt think so…)
Now, the downside…If you run benchmarks like Aquamark 3, or 3DMark01 SE, 03, or 05, you will see a 50% performance drop.
BUT….the interesting thing, is that there is NO discernable performance hit in the actual games themselves. In other words, in UT 2004, Doom3 , Far Cry, Half-life 2 and CS: Source, I get the same framerates at the same detail settings without crashes, blank screens or VPU recovers (I have that turned off, anyway).
To clarify: If I install the AGP gart driver and install 4.12 Cat Betas, I get the same frame rates in games as I do if uninstall the AGP gart driver and use 3.9 Cats, except with the latter, I have no crashes or freezes.
“ETYCOM”:http://www.i4u.com/section-viewarticle-108.html. Etymotic is now making a headset. Should be very good for noise reduction given its design. The thing works fine with Connie’s 7100t, but just is terrible with hum on my 7290. I don’t know why. Others have recommended it, but doesn’t work for me. Something to do with the connector I think. “Cnet”:http://espn.com.com/4520-6448_7-5144869-3.html liked it too.
They also make a nice looking adapter set that will take proprietary Nokia connections and turn them into standard 3.5mm headsets.
The ER22-20N3 is is just $8 and well worth it since you can use anyone’s headset then. Other useful accessories they have include various cases, filters and shirt clips that you can order online from “Etymotic”:http://etymotic.com/ephp/etycom-acc.asp.
stoer.de// Outpod Home. What Ephpod recommends for getting Outlook contacts onto your iPod.
The top Google hit is “iPodSync”:http://iccnet.50megs.com/iPodSync/ so that’s another to try.
Tom’s Hardware Guide Graphics Cards: VGA Charts IV AGP Video Cards – FarCry – Very High. I also found those benchmarks for Phil, I was looking for.
With Farcry, there are the statistics comparing video cards by family:
| Card | Farcry noAA/AF (fps) | 4xAA, 4xAF | Generation |
| GeForce 6800 GT | 79.2 | 53.4 | 2004 |
| X800 Pro | 71.1 | 48.8 | 2004 |
| Radeon 9800 Pro | 40.2 | 26.4 | 2003 |
| GeForce FX5900 U | 20.7 | 14.1 | 2003 |
| Radeon 9600 Pro | 16.8 | 15.1 | 2003 |
| GeForce Ti4600-8x | 28.3 | 12.6 | 2002 |
| GeForce4 Ti4200-8x | 23.9 | 10.5 | 2002 |
So you can see, basically, his Ti4200 is about at the limits of playability. So it is about 3x slower if you have all the antialiasing and anistrophic filtering turned off.
If you turn on all the advanced stuff, it is 5x slower and unplayable at 1024.768.
GamePC – Dothan Delight : DFI’s 855GME-MGF Pentium-M Motherboard and “Tom’s Hardware”:http://www6.tomshardware.com/motherboard/20041224/pentium_m_boards-07.html. To really build a quiet and cool home theater PC is a challenge. Using the Dothan chipset from Intel is one way to do it. This board from DFI would fit into even a small case or the Silverstone shown previously. The most interestin thing is that a standard 2GHz Pentium M can overclock to 2.8GHz and then blow away just about anything including a Pentium 4 3.6GHz and an Athlon FX-55. So that’s the chip to get if you can afford it.
The motherboard is hard to get. From “Canada”:http://www.bytewizecomputers.com/products/7/7/689/7240 for aboud CAD$350 so about $300 American. The chip itself is “$430″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=2847280/blsrt=1 , so this is an expensive if small option.
You can get it a little cheaper though with the 1.7GHz Pentium M 735 at about “$280″:http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod.php/masterid=2837762/blsrt=1 and it will overclock less since it has more like a 17x multiplier compared with 20x for the 2GHz version.
AnandTech: December 2004 HTPC Case Roundup. Big thing holding me back from building a home theater PC (htpc) has been a case. Now the Silverstone CS-SST-LC10B-M seems perfect at “$248″:http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=11-163-034&depa=0 from Newegg.
It is just $140 if you don’t have the IR remote for the Media Edition software. So this is good for a full sized computer that needs to look like stereo equipment. You’ll also want to change the fans out as it is a very noisy 56dB.
The nMediaPC HTPC-100 at “$140″:http://www.newegg.com/app/searchProductResult.asp?Submit=Go&Range=1&InnerManu=8550&DEPA=0&bop=and&description=nmediapc&InnerCata=7 at Newegg. is another option if you can find a good microATX board (see the next post for a Dothan microATX). You have to change the fan out as it is only 60mm or use the Dothan Pentium M so it creates less heat.
Well there are certainly a lot of border crossing sites. If you are going to Canada:
* “Yahoo Maps Canada”:http://maps.yahoo.ca”. They have directions that cross the border
* b o r d e r l i n e u p s . c o m – Know before you go !. Someones site with all four major border crossings.
* “Canadian Border Crossing Times”:http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/ATIS/index.htm. The official wait times in BC into the US. Usually going into the US is slower.
* “US Border Crossing”:http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/traffic/border/I5_PeaceArchPark.htm. Border crossing times from the US.
Microsoft Exchange 2003 Server Hosting Dedicated Manager Host Outlook 2000 2002 2003 XP Windows ASP. If you don’t want to run your own Exchange and Blackberry server, here’s an option.
Haven’t heard much about this, but if you have a family and you really want shared calendar, then this would do it for you. $10/month/person for Exchange hosting, then $10/month/person for Blackberry and finally you’ll need a $40/month/person plan with a carrier. So for $60/month/person, you’d be like any big corporation.
Main advantage would be shared contacts in the family and shared calendar.
AnandTech – Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 WARNING!!!. Talk about arcane version models. The K8NXP-9 is the fast version of the nForce4 Ultra chipset while the GA-K8NF-9 is the budget board built on the budget nVidia nForce4 4x chipset not the nForce4 Ultra chipset.
Confused yet?
What this means is that the 4x chipsets won’t overclock at all while the Ultras will. So don’t get this board even though its shipping now. You want the as yet unavailable K8NXP-9 or the K8NXP-9 SLI.
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