I'm sorry to hear you've had such problems with ATI Boards in the past. Actually,
I've been using ATI boards for about the past 8 years or so. My first, was an ATI
Mach32 VLB board I got with a Gateway system. It was the first board I ever brought
up NetBSD and XFree86 on. In fact, I still have the board and the VLB system (although
the system has changed a bit, going from a 486/66 to a 83MHz Pentium Overdrive
processor.)

Since then I've bought: ATI XPERT@PLAY 4 MB PCI, XPERT@PLAY 8MB PCI, XPERT 128 16MB AGP,
XPERT 2000 32MB AGP, ATI XPERT 2000 PRO 16 MB AGP, ATI RAGE FURY PRO 16MB AGP, and finally,
an ATI RADEON VE 32MB DDR AGP. Yes, I currently have 6 PC's, all running ATI Boards.
They've all been swapped in and out of each other, and various other machines as well,
in order to diagnose problems (not related to the ATI Video Boards.)

I have the ATI RADEON VE running in a SuSE 7.3 Linux box with XFree86 4.2 with DRI
enabled. I've tested it with a couple aggressive graphics games using Hardware
Acceleration. It was a bit of a trick to get XFree to work in DRI at first, but it hums
along great now.

As I stated before, I just recently bought an Apple PowerBook G4, and one of the selling
features for me, was that it had a ATI Radeon 7500 Mobility chipset. I'm actually
sad to see that Apples newest PowerMacs are using some no-name NVIDIA G-force boards.
I think NVIDIA has some really fine Graphics chipsets, but they don't make boards.
They leave that up to everyone else in the world. So, you end up with all these no-name
Graphics board companies slugging it out in the market. All these guys are driven to
pull cost out of their boards to compete.

Personally, I think it's too great a risk giving real $$'s to a graphics board company
that may not exist 6 months from now. Most of the NVIDIA board guys lobby to be "flavour of
the month" then POOF! Where'd they go!

ATI has been around for at least 10 years, and is still innovating. They've only licensed
one other graphics boards company - Hecules - to use their RADEON chipset to make graphics
boards. And, Hercules has been around since before 1985! (My first graphics board EVER!
A Monochrome board - 2-3 years before color!)

Just some food for thought!

Gerry Simmons
simmons@darykon.cet.com 


On Sat Jul 20, 2002 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?
> 
> (I fought with the ATI card in two machines.  The *one* time that it
> actually worked, it was in the "wrong" computer, but I thought that I had
> worked out the secret to seating it, so I pulled it out and it never
> worked again thereafter.  I tried several different slots, spread over the
> two machines---and other things (and other video cards) worked flawlessly
> in those slots that the ATI card wouldn't work in, so it wasn't a
> defective slot.)
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
>   ``I probably don't know what I'm talking about.'' --rauch@math.rice.edu
> 
>