@Daniel Beardsmore said:
Curious. I just put an ASUS 3450 Radeon AGP card (if that's not thread-killing suckage, I do not know what is) in my poor old PC, with my main screen on DVI1 at long last. I've put the Mac's screen on VGA (its also connected to the Mac on DVI) and I notice that the Radeon detects the second display (make and model, maximum resolution etc) and will send a signal to it when I extend my display onto it, but the picture is blank (LED is blue, backlight is on).
Its not just that the desktop backround is black and you didnt move a window or the mouse onto it?
@Ragnax said:
The Catalyst Control Center
management app is a complete piece of trash. Nine out of ten times it
doesn't install correctly or boot up correctly, which results in Windows
event logs being hammered with error entries continuously. If you have
an ATI card and have noticed that something is continuously accessing
your harddrive, then uninstall CCC and enjoy the blisfull silence
thereafter.
... Atleast with installing the
Catalyst driver through Windows Update you'll get a WHQL-certified
driver that ATI had to ship to Microsoft for review.
Its always installed and booted fine for me. Although occassionally it will say the runtime has crashed after remoting into my desktop. There used to be eventlog spam whenever you played back video using the video overlay, but iirc that was the drivers themselves, not catalyst, and I think it was fixed a few months back.
Also, fairly certain that monthly catalyst releases/drivers are all WHQL certified (except preview releases), because y'know, Windows complains like mad when you try to install a uncertified driver. Example.@topspin said:
The Catalyst Control Center installs a shell context menu handler so
that when you right click say a directory in Explorer, the first item is
"Start ATI Catalyst Control Center".
Where? I only see something like that when right clicking on the desktop...
@DOA said:
See those early ATI cards came with a ludicrously underpowered cooling
system, a tiny single slot fan controlled by drivers coded by morons.
This became a problem when new games came out. If I tried playing
Starcraft 2 on that card
The 4550 is a ridiculously underpowered card, its TDP is only 25W (compared to 150+ of high end cards), seems odd even a single slot cooler couldn't/wouldn't cope. If it was an OEM card, the OEM may have messed with the bios fan
profiles and/or changed from the reference cooling system.
That being said, I recall SC2 on release causing lots of complaints of video cards overheating (iirc due to actual GPU load being 95% or something, similar to benchmarking software, whilst most "normal" games only load the GPU to 80% or so).