This is not a review. This is just me complaining. If you like that sort of thing, keep reading. If you're looking for a review, check back in a month or two.
My Radeon 9800 AIW card was serving pretty well under Vista, but I hadn't upgraded in a few years and figured why not... time for a boost. My ASUS mobo isn't PCI-e so I looked around for a high end AGP card. I found the Radeon HD 2600 XT (512MB, AGP 8x) and thought... hey this looks like a good card. It says it supports Vista and DX10 so I ordered it.
First off, out of the box there is no support for Vista. So that was a little frustrating. Downloading drivers isn't anything new to me though, so after a few false starts and reboots, I eventually get the machine stable long enough to DL the ginormous install package and then uninstall the card, reboot and begin the process again of installing proper drivers.
The most recent drivers are dated 1/16/08 so that seems pretty recent, although I do think it's odd that my card doesn't show up in ATI's drop down list with all the others. (The PCIe edition is listed, just not the AGP) Oh well... I grab the latest Catalyst drivers and off I go...
Except, well... I don't. For some reason, the installer keeps crapping out. It can't find the card, then it can, then it can't. It says I have a generic VGA (which for the record would make it one hell of an expensive generic vga card) then it sees my card. I get spontaneous freeze, reboots, etc...
I check all the obvious stuff. Very frustrating. extra power to the card, reseat the card, uninstall reinstall, etc... eventually I get to a more or less stable environment again... only none of my games that worked before will work now. Except WoW... good old WoW works fine. Hellgate claims to support DX10 but it crashes when running with the new card. Oblivion crashes with the new card. etc...
HA! runs fine of course, but who the hell needs 512MB of Video RAM to run an ascii based console app?
So... I'm selling off my arcade games and of course, my 360 is still busted. I almost caved in and paid the $99 but I remembered how much I had wasted on this stupid video card and decided I was just throwing good money after bad.
Now that I can't do any gaming, maybe I'll finish that Sharepoint book I've been forcing myself to read. Who knows. It's either that or stick my head back in Azeroth and flush the remainder of my free time. Jason did it... I guess I could too.