Posted by lightspeed on March 08, 2002 at 12:06:10:
In Reply to: Video cards: an apology and a question posted by Jonathan the Red on March 08, 2002 at 10:36:08:
Wish I could help. We've discussed this before in the previous threads - I, too could not get the TV to be recognized when both a TV and monitor were hooked up. The TV hooked up alone wouldn't work, either. The only thing I could figure was that the S-video connector itself was shot.
If it makes you feel any better, I really bitched to the e-bay seller and got my money back. (less shipping both ways).
It wasn't "99estore" by chance who sold it to you, was it? He seems to sell a lot of these knock-off cards advertised as "ATI". I eventually left him positive feedback with a caveat - he did return my money, and I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt regarding not knowing the difference between the cards (although I suspect that he was purposeful in vaguely describing the card).
Until then, I had no idea that ATI was allowing re-sellers to use the chipset. Nvidia has done this since inception, but ATI traditionally had made/sold their own cards. Hopefully, they will continue to do so.
BTW, I picked up a Radeon 7200 for $100 with a $30 rebate at Best Buy. Works nicely.
: In this thread and this thread, I talked about cheapo no-name knockoff ATI Radeon VE-based cards. I stated that since the TV encoder is integrated with the VE core, TV output from a knockoff card should be similar to that from a genuine ATI-build product.
: Folks, I was wrong. I sincerely apologize, and if anyone bought a third-party VE card based on my comments, I feel very bad about it.
: I'm still not sure why that's the case... there are no other chips on the Radeon VE besides the core, the BIOS, and the RAM... but after actually trying my no-brand card, it's clear that the TV output sucks.
: Here's what I'm getting. If I fire up the computer connected only to the TV, the picture rolls constantly. Completely useless. If I fire up the computer connected to both a monitor and the TV, the TV is not detected by ATI's multimonitor driver and so I can't enable it.
: Can anyone offer any advice? Other than "throw out that cheap piece of junk and buy a real video card?" Which is probably what I'm going to have to do but if my situation can be salvaged, I'd like to hear any suggestions.
: And to raise once again the perennial question: if I toss the card, which card should I go with? Let's say I'd like to keep it under a hundred bucks and the only thing that's important to me is excellent quality S-Video output.