Sapphire RADEON HD 2400PRO

The Radeon 2XXXX series of cards have been largely publicised. ATI showing that it can still produce market leading high end graphic cards. Cards that would give their archrival, Nvida a run for their money. And they also had an ace up their sleeve. ATI announced that these cards would be available on the now aging AGP platform.

Since the newer PCI graphic interface was released, replacing the trusty but aging AGP interface, graphic ...
...AGP. Instead focusing their attentions on PCI. Thus alienating a large proportion of users. Users wanting to upgrade their graphic cards to play the latest games were now forced into a corner, paying hundreds of pounds to upgrade their motherboards, cpu and memory. Something that a lot of users just could not do.

All of the 2XXXX seris of cards are Direct X10 compliant, making them the ideal choice to use on a Windows Vista machine. ... more

The Radeon 2XXXX series of cards have been largely publicised. ATI showing that it can still produce market leading high end graphic cards. Cards that would give their archrival, Nvida a run for their money. And they also had an ace up their sleeve. ATI announced that these cards would be available on the now aging AGP platform.

Since the newer PCI graphic interface was released, replacing the trusty but aging AGP interface, graphic card manufactures seised to produce cards that would run on AGP. Instead focusing their attentions on PCI. Thus alienating a large proportion of users. Users wanting to upgrade their graphic cards to play the latest games were now forced into a corner, paying hundreds of pounds to upgrade their motherboards, cpu and memory. Something that a lot of users just could not do.

All of the 2XXXX seris of cards are Direct X10 compliant, making them the ideal choice to use on a Windows Vista machine. However due to their ability to decode high definition media content without using the computers main CPU, and along with their silent fans and low power ratings they also make great choices for many home theatre pc. But best of all they are available on the "old" AGP bus interface.

This is why I purchased the Radeon 2400Pro AGP card. My HTPC is not exactly cutting edge technology in fact, most of the components inside it is about 5years old. In IT times scales it's a dinosaur. Purchasing new hardware for this wrinkly beast was almost a no no, the AGP bus has now been replaced by the much newer PCI interface. But then ATI released the Radeon AGP HD2XXXX serires of cards.

Expectations for these cards were high; the rumour mill was abundant with story's of super fast benchmarks and ultra realistic graphic effects.

Indeed it was deemed as the dawn of a new age.

So where did they go wrong? In a word 'support'.

The Radeon 2XXX series of graphic cards have been available on the public market now since October 2007. That is 3 month ago since the release of these cards by ATI, and yet there is not a single official driver that fully supports the AGP version of these cards.

Catalysts Control Suite, ATI's latest driver package wont even recognise their own cards. The only way to get the newer drivers to work is to modify the INF files. Not something a newbie would want to be doing, in fact not something anybody should be doing. On the off chance that you do get the drivers installed, be it the modified ones or some very old drivers, you will then have a stream of problems.

The main problem and the one that I find the most absurd is that the drivers that do install for this card throw DirectX errors when a games is being played. Resulting in your game play from being disrupted and causing the application to fail.

To play High Definition video smoothly, registry edits have to be made and files changed. Something that should have been by the installer package.

For 3 months ATI fanboys have been shouting that this will be resolved by the next driver release, then the next and the next. For three months their cry's fell on deaf ears. ATI's loyal fans were starting to loose faith that these cards would ever be fully supported. Then ATI sat up and took notice, after months of denying that there was a problem with the driver support for these cards. ATI have admitted that in "certain user platforms the HD2XXX series of cards may not perform as good as it should". They have not solved the problem, but they are no longer in denial about it. When ATI do solve the support problem the HDXXXX AGP series cards, in a word would be fantastic.

All in all, once the cards are fully supported, they will do everything that they designed to do, bringing much needed relief to the ATI fanboys. It would be a shame for cards that have as much potential as these to be paperweights just because of the poor support. ATI have still to make an official fix, but at least they have acknowledged the problem. But is it a case of too little, too late? 

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