Bought what was advertised as New on ebay, an Ati Radeon x850 xt PCI-E. Installed in my HP Pavilion a1510n without problems.
As I boot up, I see something strange: the HP boot screen is heavily artifacted in vertical patterns. Even stranger, as I enter BIOS many of the usual letters in the menus are replaced by strange symbols and numbers. Same thing if I enter BIOS Setup. This stays apparent until I get into Windows (before installing ATI drivers; stock Nvidia ones are still there). Once in everything looks ok for the most part.
Same artifacts appear in BIOS again, but boot process is otherwise unaffected. At this point I had already changed primary video adapter from "onboard" to "PCI E" in BIOS, so they shouldn't be affecting each other.Naturally Windows loads its own default driver until I install catalyst. So I proceed to first uninstall the Nvidia drivers and install Catalyst 7.1 that I had just dled from website. Installation goes through fine, I am asked to reboot, and I do, hoping I won't see the artifacts again.
As my computer goes past the XP load screen, it will go black for a bit as if loading desktop but instead greets me with a BSOD, saying "ati2dvag" was to blame and "The Device Driver got stuck in an infinite loop." IMPORTANT: I've seen others describing BSOD's appearing midgame, but mine came up everytime as Windows was booting up. I tried older versions of Catalyst, the drivers alone, and Omega drivers but all of them gave me the same BSOD on startup.Booting in safe mode didn't show the same errors, so I'm pretty sure at this point it's either a driver issue or a bad GPU. Can anybody advise me as to what I should do at this point? I haven't been doing any overclocking or anything of the sort with the system, it's all stock. I've only had this card for a few hours. Does anybody know of issues arising when Ati Cards are put on Mobos with onboard Nvidia? THANKS TO ANYONE THAT CAN HELP!!! I really appreciate it!
HP a1510n specs:
http://review.zdnet.com/HP_Pavilion_Media_Center_a1510n/4507-3118_16-31975711.html?tag=ut
Windows XP Media Center Pro SP2
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
500 W PSU (No worries about enough juice)
Nvidia Geforce 6150 LE (Onboard)
Mobo:
ASUSTek NAGAMI2
Chipset: Nvidia GeForce 6100/6150
Southbridge: Nvidia nForce 410/430 MCP
http://digg.com/hardware/Fix_My_Radeon
