Radeon 9000

Question

Greetings,

Just got my I8200 1.7G last week, with the UltraSharp screen and ATI Radeon 9000. It looks great and I'm very happy with the performance. Got a 6322 score on Madonion's 3DMark, is that on par with a system with this spec? I ran the benchmark with the I8200 fresh out of the box from Dell, nothing additional was installed or removed and having only 128MEG of RAM. After messing around with different programs first thing I did was reformat and loaded my own WinXP Pro SP1.

Anyway, the biggest reason why I chose to upgrade to the Radeon 9000 was the upgraded scaler I've read about on the Mobility Radeon, which supposedly improves the display on a laptop LCD panel scaling down to a non-native resolution. So I tried 1280x1024 and fn+f7 to fill the screen, doesn't look much better than the regular GeForce doing the same thing. I think it's because the LCD panel itself is doing the scaling and not the Radeon. I read up on ATI's site stating that the Zoom feature is an OEM option and it's up to the manufacturer (Dell in the case) to implement that feature. Am I correct about this? In order to utilize the Mobility Radeon 9000's built-in enhanced scaler, it has to be activated in some way via software/driver?

I downloaded the latest driver from Dell's site, but found no reference to any of the OEM options described on ATI's site on the Mobility Radeon 9000. Is there a modified reference driver from ATI I can use to take advantage of these OEM options?

Thanks for any info.

I8200, 1.7G, UltraSharp on Mobility Radeon 9000, 512M, IBM 40G 5400RPM HD, fixed Toshiba 8X DVD, 12G second HD, HL-DT-ST 24X CDRW/8X DVD combo drive (trying to make this the fixed drive but need part# for bezel/cover, anyone?), 40G external firewire drive.

lweisenb · Answer

you can use any ATI driver, but you have to modify the inf file of the new file with the lines from the dell inf files that relate to: the should be a whole bunch of lines after [ATI Mfg] the real ATI drivers also have rotation, if you have an external lcd that supports it, powerplay which will automatically reduce battery consumption when not on ac. I believe the standard drivers have it though under display propertiese / advanced / displays tab select panel and make sure scale image to panel size is checked.

[ATI.Mfg]
"MOBILITY RADEON 9000" = something, something
"MOBILITY RADEON 9000 " = something, something

eXPeeve · Answer

Did you purchase the video card and upgrade it yourself, or order the whole system from Dell?

Inspiron 8100, Pentium III 1.0 GHz, 15" UXGA 1600x1200 IBM
384 MB SDRAM, 30GB Hard Drive, Windows XP Professional [SP1]
64MB DDR 4X AGP NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go
NVIDIA Detonator 41.03 (WHQL Candidate?), FlashBIOS Version A13

andylatc · Answer

I ordered the whole system from Dell.

I returned another system with the 32M GeForce 4 Go, SXGA screen, then ordered this new one from Dell.

I guess I'm going to try ATI's reference driver and modify the inf file. I did that on the GF4 and it worked beatifully. All I had to add to the original inf file is the 1400x1050 resolution. Does anyone know if ATI's driver has the ATI Zoom utility included?

lweisenb · Answer

as far as your 3dmark i would say yes considering the 1.7 proc.  I got 6643 with a 2.0ghz/640MB on the ati

Creed5150 · Answer

I have a Inspiron 5100, 2.4 Pent4, 1GB DDR, 9000M 64MB card. Just fiddled with some settings and ran Mark2001. Got a 7005 benchmark..How's that? I think it's petty good.

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Radeon 9000

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