Sapphire ATI Radeon 9550 256Mb AGP

[IanH]

Hi,
I tried replacing my existing ASUS Radeon 9250 128Mb AGP graphics card with a Sapphire ATI Radeon 9550 256Mb AGP card purchaed on Ebay recently (needed DirectX 9 support for a game that my son bought). I un-installed the 9250 drivers in Device Manager, powered off the PC (Compaq EVO D510 CMT, Pentium 4, 2.4 GHz, Intel 845G Chipset, 1.5 Gb PC2100 DDR Ram, AGP 4x, 2x IDE HDD 80 Gb & 40 Gb, DVD-RW & CD-RW, 220W PSU, Windows XP Home w\- SP2) changed over the graphics cards and powered the PC back up - the cooling fan on the card ran. When the start-up got to the first Windows XP screen the blue moving dots were garbled. From then on the display was garbled with bars down the screen and very difficult to read. However, I could see in the clutter that the desktop had appeared and the "Detected New Hardware" had come up. I directed the wizard to the folder where the display driver was located and it started copying files. However, at the end it said it encountered a problem and that the hardware could not be installed and "Access denied" - after a few minutes it locked up.
Have I gotten a lemon or can someone suggest a solution?

Thanks

 

[Taz100420]

Are they the new drivers for the card? And does the garbled screen clear up? If not sounds like a bad card.

 

[Random Murderer]

sounds like you bought a card that someone messed up and then decided to sell. personally, i don't buy used parts except from my friends.
also, the 9250 DOES have directx 9, it's just a slower card than the 9550.

 

[IanH]

The drivers were the latest (7.10) downloaded from the ATI website.

Sorry, it was Shader 2.0 that the game required - the 9250 only had 1.4

Any way to test the card?

 

[Random Murderer]

The drivers were the latest (7.10) downloaded from the ATI website.

Sorry, it was Shader 2.0 that the game required - the 9250 only had 1.4

Any way to test the card?

try it in another computer if you can.

 

[MrMariusz]

I just returned an identical sapphire Radeon 9550 (displaying the same issues; it wouldn't even boot on some mobos). Judging from the amount of complaints about this card on google, I can only conclude that there's a significant amount of poorly constructed 9550's...

The card's flown back to China because they weren't in stock anymore in Belgium, they don't even make this card anymore, I'm thinking Sapphire wont even bother fixing it having in mind all the flaws that came with a lot of these cards, perhaps they might even ship a 9600 or return money ... have to wait 2-3 weeks for it to return. The guy from the pc store wanted to trade it with a 9250, but no thanks...

 

[bubba_000]

I heard that new catalists have problems with agp cards. Also, the fact that your mobo is only agpp4x might have something to do with it. And isn't your psu a little weak?

 

[hat]

220w psu is fine for that system.
It sounds to me like somebody ripped you off big time. My advice is pick up a radeon x1650pro. Here's an example (I know you don't live in the US)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161052