Fails to live up to expectation
Written: May 28 '00
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: supposed to be a good mid range graphics accelerator
Cons: locks up frequently on some systems
|
|
|
| datoken's Full Review: Rio Diamond Stealth III S540, (32 MB) AGP Video Ca... |
Now in the days of heavy graphical games and other software I found myself needing to upgrade my video card to accommodate these vast changes.
After reading some online reviews and determining what my computer would handle, I decided upon the Diamond Stealth III S540 Savage Pro+. I just knew that I would be jamming to some intense graphical games in no time at all.
I kept my eye open at various online retailers and local computer stores and finally found it on sale at CompUSA. I found this to be an even greater bargain because it came with a 20-dollar in store discount as well as a $30 mail in rebate.
I went to the counter, requested to see the box to once again verify that my computer could handle this board and was relieved to find that it would.
Getting the card home, I quickly read the install directions, changed the display settings as directed, shut down my computer, took out the old video card and installed the new card in a matter of minutes.
I rebooted my computer, followed the onscreen directions and proceeded to check my system to determine that everything had been loaded correctly. That is until my computer locked up. A little concerned, but thinking that I probably just needed some updated drivers, I rebooted my system and proceeded to check the system configuration again.
Again, my screen froze and locked up. This happened about 6-7 times before I took out the new card and reinstalled the old one. This time when I booted I went to check the drivers and it had the appropriate drivers for the Diamond Stealth card I was installing.
I proceeded to visit the diamond online site to check for new drivers and found a handy little driver update installation tool that I downloaded. I once again reinstalled the new card, rebooted, went to the install tool and again my system froze. Angry and frustrated I repeated the previous steps by inserting my original card and manually loaded the new drivers. At this point I went and set my display performance to minimal, basically disabling the acceleration of the new card, reinstalled the new card, rebooted with no problems, installed the new drivers, checked everything once over again, and then rebooted my computer.
It worked fine, I could do just about anything so I figured I had the problem corrected. I went to the display properties and bumped up the setting one notch to see if the acceleration would work and before I could even click continue, the computer froze again.
At this point i took out the new card, placed it back in the box, reinstalled my old card and rebooted with no problems. I went to several web sites offering troubleshooting and found that this is a common problem with this card. That is works well when the acceleration is turned off but otherwise the system locks up.
I was very disappointed to find this out seeing that now I have a brand new 3D graphics accelerator that I can not use, nor can I return to CompUSA. A wasted 79 bucks and a very disappointed customer.
Before purchasing any new card for your computer I think it would be wise to look up troubleshooting problems to determine if that particular card has any problems that happen frequently and that can not be resolved.
Recommended:
No
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
datoken
|
|
Location: Kentucky
Reviews written: 33
Trusted by: 6 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.