Hey I bought an ATI Radeon 9600XT 128MB graphics card back in November... I installed it on my moms PC and it worked just fine... I could run HL2 on halfway-full almost no problems (when I got another 512MB RAM it worked with no problems just a lil slow on loading screens)

THen I bought my own PC:

• AMD Athlon 64 3000+ @ 2.0GHz not OC and Socket 754
• 200 GB HDD
• 1 Gig RAM (one stick is PNY idk what the other is) PC 2700 333 MHz
• Biostar K8VGA-M Mother board
• 500Watt PSU
• and more

I installed the card and the latest drivers just fine... but when I ran Half Life 2 and played it for a few minutes a TON of artifacts (dots all over which appear to use some lighting effects) appeared... they disappear every time the game loads a new level or I change any settings...

I also noticed UT04 did the same in lighted area... I contacted ATI and they told me to change a few settings in BIOS but didnt help... then they told me to send it in for repairs.... when I got it back I still had the same problem... Then I contacted Biostar and they told me to try a different card but I cant because of finacual problems and no other friends have cards i can borrow...

Then they told me to do a BIOS update and I had to go buy/install a floppy drive to do this.... but it didnt work....

also a while ago after I got my card back from ATI just for the heck of it I tried changing AGP 8x to AGP 4x and HL2 ran just fine.... but I want to run it on 8x for hte full HL2 experience!

Is there anything else I can try? I am desperate for an end to this battle....

bump! *sry if this isnt allowed....*

That's a common fix, along with disabling fast-writes. Performance difference? Hardly any!

When you sent the card back for repairs, were you actually told it was replaced/repaired?

Is the card running rather warm at all? Try a quick thermal test using an open case and a deskfan blowing right on the video card (unless you happen to have thermal monitoring on the card and a readout in the control panel).

Agreed. Some ATi Radeon cards do not handle running at AGP 8X very well in some motherboards. Stick to AGP 4X

Performance difference? A few percentage points at best For a 'full HL2 experience' you would need to replace the card with a considerably more capable one!

oh well I was planning on getting a socket 939 with PCI-E in the next year anyway :p

thanks for trying to help!