The new:

• Cooler Master Centurion 590 case with (5) 120mm fans and (1) 80mm fan
• Raidmax 850W Modular PSU
• ASUS M4A79 Deluxe motherboard with 7.1 audio and gigabit lan onboard
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 3.0GHz Black Edition processor
• XIGMATEK Dark Knight Black Nickel CPU Heatsink and 120mm fan
• OCZ Platinum Edition 4x2GB PC2 6400 (DDR2 800) RAM
• BFG Tech nVidia GeForce 9800 GTX+ 1GB PCI-E 2.0 x16 video card
• Samsung Spinpoint 1TB 7200RPM SATA HDD
• LG 22X SATA DVD±RW burner
• Windows Vista Ultimate x64
• Kubuntu 8.10 x64

The old:

• Generic 19″ LCD monitor (1280×1024 native)
• Logitech 5.1 surround speakers
• WesternDigital 250GB USB2.0 HDD
• Seagate FreeAgent 320GB USB2.0 HDD

My official burn-in test consisted of running (and beating) Bioshock at its highest settings, then running (and beating) Crysis x64 at 1280×1024 on high with 2XAA with a 38FPS average – 28FPS low / 84FPS high. Windows fully boots in 26 seconds with 82 processes at startup. Kubuntu takes slightly longer with its hardware parsing, and clocks in at 48 seconds for full boot. There’s probably a way to speed this up, but I don’t care enough to put the effort in.

I waited a long time to have a setup like this, and I’m enjoying every second of it!

After working on my previous issue with texture corruption in 3D with my Radeon HD 3650, I was perplexed as to why I could not install the v8.9 drivers and CCC, considering the HD 3650 is listed as being supported by version 8.9. I dug into the installer and actually found the issue, and it was simple to fix!

As it turns out, the v8.9 drivers and CCC do support the Radeon HD 3650, but perhaps the card manufacturers – though using the same chipset – identify the chipset differently. The problem I had that prevented my 3650 from being supported was that its Hardware IDs are reported as

However, the supported Hardware ID for the ATI Radeon HD 3650 AGP is

PCIVEN_1002&DEV_9596

Thus the only solution that I came up with was also the working solution, and this is what I came up with.

The v8.9 installer comes in two flavors. ATI provides an installer for the Catalyst Control Center (CCC) which includes the drivers, and a standalone installer for the drivers if you don’t want CCC. Either way, the solution is the same. Please note, though, I’m using Windows XP. This solution may not work for Vista users. If it does work in Vista, please let me know.

1. Download the installer (either one) from the AMD/ATI site here.
2. Run the installer.
3. If the installer alerts you that supported hardware was not found, click ok. The installer will close.
4. Open either of the following folders, depending on your installer:
   C:\ATISUPPORT8-9_xp32_dd_68898XP_INF
   C:\ATISUPPORT8-9_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_68898DriverXP_INF
5. Open the following file in a text editor:
   CX_68898.inf
6. Locate the heading on line 34:
   [ATI.Mfg.NTx86]
7. Add an extra line below the heading and insert the following text:
   "ATI Radeon HD 3650 AGP" = ati2mtag_RV630, PCIVEN_1002&DEV_9596&SUBSYS_00281043
8. Save the file and run either of the following, depending on your installer:
   C:\ATISUPPORT8-9_xp32_dd_68898\Setup.exe
   C:\ATISUPPORT8-9_xp32_dd_ccc_wdm_enu_68898\Setup.exe

If everything goes according to plan, you will have the current drivers and CCC if you chose the CCC installer.

My new Asus AH3650 Silent (Radeon HD 3650) came with the Catalyst v8.7 drivers, which were installed properly upon Windows XP bootup. The Radeon HD 3650, in AGP, has issues when displaying certain textures in 3D games. All other aspects of the card worked perfectly, but strange banding and discolloration occured when any D3D game was loaded.

As it turns out, the problem is actually two-fold. First, AGP FastWrite must be disabled in BIOS. The AGP FastWrite option does not properly write the texture data to the video card. Next, AMD-ATI has provided a HotFix for Catalyst and the Radeon HD 3000 Series drivers. You can get the HotFix here. This will update Catalyst and your drivers to v8.8. The HotFix also includes SmartGart for CCC, which provides information on the state of the AGP and PCI slots, and allows you to test them to make sure AGP FastWrite is off. Once v8.8 is installed and the PC is restarted, crank up the settings in the 3D menu and load up your game of choice!

This issue is also present in the Radeon HD 2000 Series cards, and the same steps may be taken to solve the problem.

Here’s a full description of the issue, to help diagnose if you are suffering from this problem:

• Broken textures that should be solid (i.e. A box that should be solid, but has transparent stripes.)
• Broken textures that display in color bands – most likely purple or green.
• Transparent or semi-transparent textures that tile as solid, with severe artifacting and discoloration.
• Text that displays garbled or text with textured backgrounds which appear garbled.
• Fullscreen images or framed images that appear “lens-flared.” The best way to describe this is if you imagine you have a picture, and in the top left corner you have a smaller copy of the picture, and another smaller copy of the picture in the top left corner of that picture. Many times, the copies are distorted in some way – whether stretched or discolored – but are clearly the same as the main image you are supposed to see.

I hope this helps at least one person, and it doesn’t take them long to find this post to get help. I worked on this issue for a couple of days before I found out what the problem was, and it was still trial and error before I found the final solution.