ATI Radeon 3650 AGP problem (it sucks, basically)

A couple of days ago I bought an ATI Radeon 3650 AGP 512MB. It is hard to find an AGP card these days. The other contender was an NVDIA 7600GT 512 MB. I got the ATI one despite my good judgement because it looked better on paper(higher clock speed, DirectX 10.1 support and HD hardware decoding) and was 25 euros cheaper. My initial reactions were good and i was happy about my desktop use and video decoding but when I tried a game everything changed...it simply would not work correctly.

The official ATI Catalyst drivers would not even install.

Most games would crash gving me a Blue screen of death. Some would not even load. Even if they did load they would be slower than death. It was absolutely horrible. After some googling I found out that the ATI AGP cards of the last year, or so, have a really bad agp implementation in comparison with their PCI Express equivalents. I read through many forums where poeple where having the same problem as me with their ATI agp cards 3650, 3850 and some 2000 series.

There is a hotfix driver aimed for those cards but it did not work for me. It did not work for many other people as well. Some managed to solve the problem, while other solved it only partially. I tried every method mentioned with no effect but apparently it has something to do with the catalyst versions. Some older versions work better than the current one (8.12). Having a Graphics Card that previous drivers work better than the current ones is unforgivable. ATI drivers in the past sucked in comparison to the NVIDIA forceware but I thought that it got better. Well....it did not, at least for the AGP implementations. If you are not going to properly support it do not even market the damn thing. One stop at the Catalyst Official forum will persuade you about the bad quality of these drivers.

NVIDIA 7600GT to the rescue.

After many hours of trying to fix it I realized that future drivers might be either better or worse and that these problems are more than 1 years old and ATI still has not addressed them correctly. I decided that I should return the card back to were I bought it. This morning I went back to the store explained to them the situation, returned the card and ordered the NVIDIA 7600 GT: tried and trusted AGP drivers.

*UPDATE
The 7600GT AGP arrived. I installed it and everything runs just fine. By the way, much easier to get everything running on Linux as well.Take that ATI. NVIDIA for the win!

AGP Graphics Cards in this day and age? Yeap..

Some time ago the graphics card of my old rig died. It actually burned out little by little over the course of a week. It was a mighty(when I bought it anyhow) NVIDIA 6800 GT. The flagship card of NVIDIA 3-3,5 years ago. Googling it I found out that many 6800 GT burned out at approximately 3 years of use. Shame because I really liked that card. Digital life goes on I guess and I had to replace it. I decided that the time was right to go buy a new card (in the mean time it was wearing a humble NVIDIA TNT2 that I found laying around). The only problem was that the motherboard, an MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum, only supported AGP Graphics cards. Where the hell was I supposed to find a proper AGP card for my old rig January 2009?

The late 6800GT. A beast of a card when it came out.

Well...they do exist and I was very happy with the fact. It is not like there is an abundance of AGP cards in the market, or that there is variety but just enough to make my purchase an revive this machine for at least a couple of year. I ended up getting an ASUS ATI Radeon 3650 with 512 MB RAM for 75 euros. The other contender was an Nvidia 7600GT 512MB RAM for 100 euros. In theory ATI was a better card and cheaper than the 7600, I wanted though to get the NVIDIA. t probably has something to do with the Linux problems ATI had in the past or that I always liked better NVIDIA cards for gaming than the ones ATI produced. I do not have the slightest idea why the 7600 was priced 100 euros. The 3650 provides HD hardware decoding DirectX 10.1 support and the clock speeds are higher. In addition it sports a passive silent cooling system. Thus despite my initial concerns I bought the ATI yesterday and so far I am pretty happy with my choice. Just for the record, the rest of the AGP cards I found in the market(to buy new) was some lameass 3450 and a 6200 both of which are worse than my 6800 that burned out.

Look at the cooling system on this baby...huge. I barely fit it in the case.

For anyone looking to buy the 3650 bare in mind to not use the ATI catalyst drivers but the Saphire catalyst drivers. Apparently the ATI AGP drivers for the 36xx series has a problem that is addressed by saphire.

*UPDATE
After I tried on some games I found out that ATI 3650 AGP sucks. It has major problems that are not addressed even by the hotfix drivers mentioned above. Find out more.