RESOLVED: I Hate ATI

Today, I got home from eating breakfast out with the wife (Pinky Dink), turn on my barely one year old Samsung 216BW widescreen monitor and everything was piss-yellow.

I fired up the ATI Catalyst Control Center (which I hate) and bumped the blue channel up until it looked OK. That was fine for a few minutes, but it started going yellow on me again, sort of pulsating.

Certain the monitor was dying, I switched to another box (I have five boxes on a keyboard/mouse/video [KVM] switch). Every box was fine, so I went back to Old Yellowstain and twiddled the cable.

The screen went black and the box rebooted. No video. At all.

Popped the side cover off and pulled the video card out. The cooling fan was jammed tight.

Another. Fucking. Fan. GRRRRRRRRR.

I dropped back to the built-in Radeon Express 200 and it was fine (after a little screwing around). Played a few rounds of UT with no problems.

Obviously during these last ten or eleven months of crashing UT, dicking around with drivers, changing the hardware, etc., the problem was a lousy, fucking, pancake fan.

I ran out and bought an NVidia card to replace it. 9400 GT. No SLI support, which I can't use in this box anyway, having only one PCI-e slot. Off-brand (PNY), sixty-five bucks (which means you can probably get it for $49.95 at TigerDirect), 512MB of RAM (the old one had 256).

It, too, has a fucking fan, meaning some day it will die. By that time, I'm sure I'll be able to get a 1T card for sixty five bucks.

Now, as to why I hate ATI.

It was the FAN, right? No reason to hate ATI. After all, they didn't design the fan.

What I hate about ATI, what I really, really HATE is that bloated, steaming pile of shit called "The Catalyst Control Center" (CCC). After a reboot it takes forever and a day and a half to give you back control of your system once you log in. NVidia's equivalent (NVidia Control Panel) takes seconds to light up in the system tray and you're ready to rock and roll.

The only reason I was running CCC was it was the only way to turn on the "VPU Recover" option (much easier with the Omega driver).

So there you have it. I will probably be playing UT a lot more this Winter.

See you online!