AIW 9800 Pro help, please?

[Razz]

I need some help determining if I’m doing something wrong or if my AIW 9800 Pro card is bad.

I have an HTPC based on an ASUS A7NX Deluxe (nVidia nForce2 chipset) motherboard with an AthlonXP 25000+, 1GB of PC2700 RAM, and 3x200GB HDDs. I had originally installed an AIW 8500DV on this HTPC, which worked pretty well despite the buggy MMC software. But several months ago, I decided to upgrade my old back office PC (733 MHz PIII with onboard Intel graphics) by moving the AIW 8500DV from the modern HTPC to my old back office PC, and installing an AIW 9800 Pro in the HTPC. The AIW 8500DV upgraded my back office PC’s performance nicely but the TV & video recording performance on our HTPC seems to have decreased dramatically with the installation of the AIW 9800 Pro (compared to the older AIW 8500DV).

On my HTPC with the AIW 8500DV installed, I used to be able to be able to resize the TV window, run multiple applications, and start new applications while watching or recording TV-- all without any glitch in the TV’s audio or video. If I remember correctly, my HTPC’s CPU used to loaf at about 3-5% while watching TV, and maybe jump to 35% while recording TV shows on the “high quality DVD” MPEG2 preset. Ever since I installed the AIW 9800 Pro, the TV sucks up about 27% of the CPU (while watching S-Video with no TVOD) and about 45% while watching TV from the tuner (with the unfortunately mandatory TVOD). That jumps to like 95% when I record on the “high quality DVD” MPEG2 preset. And if I resize the TV window or open a new application, the TV video and audio briefly glitches (which also shows up on recordings). In addition, the audio sometimes loses sync, which can be remedied by changing channels or input connectors. And the TV crashes the PC periodically. It's pretty awful.

Ironically, my old 733MHz PIII PC (with the AIW 8500DV) only uses about 17% of the CPU to run the TV (whether through the tuner or the S-Video input-- and no TVOD) and it only uses about 75% of the CPU to record high quality DVD MPEG2.

I’ve tried several different combinations of drivers and MMCs on my HTPC, but to no avail. Currently, I’m on Catalyst 6.6 and MMC 9.14. All such installations involved manually cleaning out the old drivers and MMC (including manually removing registry settings and deleting ATI folders) and installing the new stuff in the recommended order. All chipset drivers are the latest.

I’m starting to wonder if I have something in my BIOS configuration set improperly (although it’s pretty much on the “automatic” settings), and/or the AGP memory isn’t being utilized, or if I just have a bad card. It just doesn’t make sense to me that the newer 128MB AIW 9800 Pro would have performance that is significantly lower than the old 64MB AIW 8500DV. I don’t really do any gaming on the PC, so I can’t speak to the 3D performance.

Any help would be most appreciated. I’m ready to junk this card and buy a second AIW 8500DV.

[lordsmurf]

Yeah, something in your setup or hardware is the issue, more than likely. Be especially sure the hard drives are DMA and the RAM is set correctly in the BIOS.

[Razz]

Thanks Lordsmurf. The hard disk DMAs are still turned on. I haven't changed the BIOS RAM settings since I originally built the PC with the AIW 8500DV card (which worked well). Should I have? Is there a BIOS setting that I should have changed to match the newer AIW 9800 Pro?

Is there any way that I can diagnose the problem, like running a test on the graphics card memory or something?