Resolved - Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2600 XT question

[cackerso]

I'm trying to figure out how to go with a new motherboard and graphics card. And because of my lack of knowledge I'm still a bit confused.

Saist pointed out that I can get a HD 2600 XT card and an Asus M2R32-MVP to work with MEPIS 7 but that there was no graphics support for this card in Windows 2000 and the fastest card I can use is a Raedon x1900 or x1950. Right now I have a dual boot setup with MEPIS and W2K on an older AMD Sempron system.

However at their website, a Diamond Viper Radeon HD 2600 XT lists under its system requirements that it will function with an AMD Athlon running Windows 2000 among other setups. Does that mean they made their own driver? Does it mean I could use this on the motherboard I'm planning on getting, and that I could use this card instead of the x1950 card?

What is more confusing to me is that I read that W2K doesn't support dual processors or 64 bit processors and XP pro does. So why will an Athlon 5000 work with Windows 2000 pro? And if I want to play games on the Windows partition is it worth getting XP and the 2600 card, or is there little difference in performance with 2000 pro an Athlon 64 processor and an x1950 card?

Part of this is also that I could never get drivers to work with MEPIS on the old motherboard and video card. So at least it looks like either way I go on the dual boot at least MEPIS will give me 3D support.


One other smaller point, I went and looked at the ATI website and the driver Saist mentioned I could use in 2000 has an tag in the name that suggests its for xp not 2000 "x...-cat72-xp" which I believe is the 8.34 driver. I take it that it won't complain and will install OK under 2000 pro anyway.

[Saist]

More likely they compiled their own driver from AMD's sources.

Also : yes. Windows 2K DOES work with Dual Processors, and it DOES run on 64bit processors. However, it's the same as running Mepis 32bit on a 64bit processor. You only use 32bits of the processor.

Because of the architecture Microsoft uses in the NT5 kernel, there is no overall performance gain between running Windows NT5 in 32bit mode, and Windows NT5 in 64bit mode (Windows 2000 versus Windows Xp 64), even if you do have over 4gigs of memory installed.

On AMD's driver site the last driver to be released explicitly FOR Windows 2000 was the Catalyst 6.2 release : http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/2k/radeonx-2k.html

However, the Xp drivers would still install up to a point. I've got a Windows 2000 system running with the last supported driver, which I remembered being the 8.34 driver. Now I'm going to go check and make sure I was right on that.

I'll also get back to you with an idea of the graphics performance difference between an x1900 and an HD 2600... Won't be entirely accurate though... The x1900 will be under Windows Xp on an Athlon64 X2 @ 3ghz...

and the 2600 under Vista on a Turion X2 @ 2ghz.

[Saist]

okay, first. I DID get my 4's wrong. It was Catalyst 7.4 with the 8.36 driver... not Catalyst 7.2 with the 8.34 driver.

The install files I keep on hand for Win2k installations are the seperate 7.4 driver and Catalyst Control Center.




The Catalyst control center view of what is installed:




And verification by DxDiag




So here's what happens when I try to install Catalyst 7.5 with the 8.38 driver... the first to support RadeonHD from ATi's downloads.

I get this nasty little error message :




I can try other driver downloads from AMD's site, but I think most of them behave in a similar manner.

Out of curiosity, I do have the Diamond driver from here : http://www.dmmdownload.com/current.php : downloading to see why Diamond is claiming RadeonHD support on Windows 2000.

... ... bloody image limit.

[Saist]

here's the skipped picture from the reply up above, showing the START of the 7.5 driver installation :

[cackerso]

Saist,

Thank you very, very much. Both for your time and your expertise.

So just to make sure; I'm should get a x1950 card and use the Catalyst 7.4 driver. I'm glad this will all work just fine with 2000, I've never cared much for XP and it was at that point I decided to start looking at Linux distributions.

I've installed a few motherboards and replaced video cards but this stuff always makes me nervous.

I'm using a guide posted here: http://www.playtool.com/pages/home/index.html

If you think there are any pitfalls or other things to be careful about please let me know. And again, Thank you!

[Saist]

As I thought. Diamond is playing fast and hard, and are getting busted... by me.

The first thing is the driver download itself. It's not official. Rather, it's the 8.43 Release Candidate 4 driver set.




Second, it's not a 32bit driver as Diamond Claims :

Download [EXE] ALL ATI VIDEO CARD WIN XP 2K DRIVERS VER DMM3-0

Checking out the driver install package itself...






Reveals that the driver is a 64bit driver:




What I can tell you is this then : Diamond Multimedia does not appear to have done any self compiling of the Catalyst drivers to support Windows 2000. I don't know if the driver included with the graphics card is the same as the download driver, but their download is a Release Candidate for the 8.43 driver set.

My conclusion then is that Diamond Multimedia is probably lying through their teeth about supporting Windows 2000.

[Saist]

... and while I'm putting together the bit about Diamond's downloads...

Okay : as far as pitfalls go... if you've replaced video cards, it should be a stock replacement. Just have the Catalyst 7.4 packages ready to go before you start... and you should be fine.

Any issues that you might need to be aware of can probably be found in the release notes : https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206...ase_notes.html

***

Edit : btw, under Linux, you are not restricted to the older driver. As I said, I have the motherboard you got... and here's what I'm running on it