So, my new Apple Cinema Display arrived, and with it came a myriad of problems. None of these problems are specific to the monitor, however, but instead to another company that begins with the letter A, namely ATI.
This latest batch of problems adds to the already ridiculous list of issues I've had with my Radeon 9700 Pro, and I've decided that I will never again buy an ATI product. This saddens me, but I'm sorry to say not much has changed.
A little background, I used to use ATI cards years ago, and loved them. Their PCI cards were excellent and very fast, and they ran in all of my systems. However, around the time of the RAGE PRO line, I experienced nothing but buggy drivers and total system instability. So much so that I had to sell the card and move to a different vendor. First was Voodoo, then NVidia.
And NVidia is where I stayed for years. I enjoyed a stable system, and regarded ATI as a thing of the past, destined for the same fate as Voodoo. However, last year, when I built this computer, I looked at video cards, and much to my surprise, ATI was back on top. The benchmarks for the ATI Radeon 9700 looked incredible, and I couldn't wait to play UT2003 and Splinter Cell with it.
And for the past year, I've endured nothing but problems with it.
Firstly, it took me 2 driver updates before I could play either of the aforementioned games without immediate lockups.
Next came the issue with my Pinnacle PCTV Pro capture card; any attempt to capture video would lock the system and blue screen Windows 2000 with a STOP error on my video card driver DLL. Awesome.
Then I found out there was a conflict with the Radeon 9700 and my motherboard, a Gigabyte 8INXP. I have to turn fast-write off in the Smartgart settings, or games lock up pretty consistently. Some sites even recommended setting the AGP bus to a max of 4X, half the speed the card can go. What's the point in getting an 8X motherboard & card if they don't work together? Even with the latest drivers for the board & card, problems still persist to this day with fast-writes turned on.
On top of that, the card has several problems in Windows with minimizing and maximizing programs; it will cause a brief CPU spike and momentarily freeze the system. I can't reproduce this with any other graphics card, but I can with every version of Catalyst drivers I've tried.
And of course, let's not forget the three days of my life I wasted trying to get 3D support working properly in Linux. ATI's linux driver insists on going through an entire XFree86 setup, despite the fact that I already have a working X86 Config file set up. Eventually, I got the drivers working, and the fear of having to waste my time on that shit again has prevented me from upgrading both my distro and my version of XFree. I guess I'm not hardcore enough, and I'm sure I'll be ridiculed for this entry, but I don't care. I don't want to spend ridiculous amounts of time getting drivers working. I never had to do this crap with NVidia cards under Linux either.
So, with that history written, let me now describe the problems plaguing me with my new monitor.
First and foremost, the Radeon chipset won't display text mode with this monitor. Let me repeat that, in case you aren't taking the mental trip with me. It won't display anything in text mode. Guess what that means? No boot sequence. No boot manager. No way to change BIOS settings. No real means of dual booting. I literally don't see anything until I'm at the login screen for Windows. Yes, it means I'm stuck in Windows as well. I can't display anything in Linux, hell I can't even see GRUB to get to Linux in the first place.
Once in Windows, it won't display 32 bit colors. Oh sure, the driver will let you set it to 32 bit, but it only displays 16. Yeah, that's fantastic.
Additionally, there seems to be an issue with certain motherboards & Radeons in which the system won't boot if the Cinema Display is connected at power-on. You have to connect it to the DVI port AFTER you turn the system on. Splendid!
As far as I'm concerned, this is officially the last straw. If ATI can't even have a decent DVI implementation, then it's not worth giving them my money.
Since I don't plan on keeping this box for too much longer (wishful thinking about a Dual G5), I decided earlier today to replace my video card with a model from NVidia, but not a real upgrade so much as a lateral move to another vendor's products. So I bought a 256 meg GeForce FX 5700 Ultra. I got it for a very good price, and I'm thrilled about that. A few of my friends have cards in the FX lineup, and they have no problems with them, so I'm hoping I'll be just fine as well. In the mean time, I'm looking for a buyer for my Radeon, since it's not serving me very well right now.
It's a shame too, I wanted ATI's cards to be stable and fast. I wanted blazing benchmarks and excellent framerates. Unfortunately, I never got any of those things, and it's extremely depressing. So, I'm officially back as an NVidia customer, and it doesn't look like I'll be going anywhere else anytime soon.
I've been paying a fair amount of attention to Apple's 100 Million iTunes Songs Countdown recently, as it's been getting closer & closer to the 100 million goal.
I happened to be awake during the final moments of the contest, and the numbers were pretty amazing. In under two hours, Apple sold over 100,000 songs. The numbers shown on Apple's home page built up quickly:
Time: 11:46 PM
Songs: 99,914,861
Time: 11:51 PM
Songs: 99,918,298
Time: 11:54 PM
Songs: 99,921,272
Time: 11:59 PM
Songs: 99,924,431
Time: 12:02 AM
Songs: 99,927,264
In that 16 minute time period, Apple sold over 12,400 songs. That's an average of over 775 per minute.
Honestly, I'm impressed. This is huge for Apple.