On Sat, Jul 20, 2002 at 11:44:23AM -0500, Richard Rauch wrote:
> Both of you (Gerald and Andrew) seem to recommend ATI cards.  I was really
> hoping to avoid ATI cards.  At least for PCI, they are trash as far as I'm
> concerned.  (When I got an ATI PCI card a couple of years ago, I wore my
> fingers raw trying to get it seated properly.  I finally gave up in
> disugust and bought a no-name board that Just Worked the first time I
> plugged it in.)  Maybe they are better for AGP, though.
> 
> 
> Did you *personally* install the cards, or did you get a computer that had
> it pre-installed by some poor tech?

Mine is an AGP card.  I assembled my system myself.  I did not have any
kind of issue like you are describing.
It is an "ATI Radeon 64MB DDR ViVo", which is approximately a 7200, but
it is from before the naming change.

> The problem, I think, is that the ATI card uses too-short an edge
> connector on its card.  (It is visibly much shorter on their PCI card that
> I tried than other PCI video cards.  This was also complained about by
> someone else on one of the NetBSD lists as I recall.)  I don't know if
> this is a problem peculiar to the PCI cards, or if it's because ATI makes
> AGP cards, too, and AGP cards are *supposed* to have short connectors.

If you aren't going to upgrade to AGP, don't bother at this point.  You
want the additional bandwidth of AGP for your DVD playback.

-Andrew