I recently had to reinstall windows XP and had forgotten what problems installing this card presented. Like a previous reviewer, all i reall want to do is to be able to watch streamed video on my sony TV - HD and SD.
The first problem i had was that the resolution would revert from the native 1440 x 900 screen resolution (that i had to set in CCC) to 1024 x 768 every time i rebooted. I think this was because - as i eventually realised - i had the TV connected when i installed the drivers. In any event, reinstalling with the TV disconnected appeared to solve that one; and the resolution set to native automatically.
Then i had the problem that anything with a 4:3 A/R that i streamed from the PC to the TV ended up stretched to 16:9. Also 16:9 video ended up with horizontal black bars above and below the screen, effectively giving me a 2.35 ish A/R. I tried all sorts of combinations in displays properties and DTV(HDMI)2 but could not get it to work.
I emailed ATI support who were complete rubbish saying "The settings that did this for Theatre Mode disappeard in the Catalsyt software a couple of years ago. If you have options in the CCC to enable GPU Scaling or Maintain Aspect Ratio, try turning them off." When i said this was unhelpful, they replied "Theatre Mode settings changed with Microsoft updates, Vista and Windows 7 are worse than XP is. Generally opening the application on the display you are running it on works best and in Extended not clone mode."
I know this is essentially nonsense as i had run the card OK before the XP reinstallation.
Anyway, i found the earliest drivers i could from the sapphire website, installed them, and the A/R now seems to work - albeit after a reboot which seemed to kickstart the full-sreen-mirror facility.
The other problem i have is an occassional (once a month or so) BSOD, usually, but not exclusively, when watching a web stream on the TV. God knows what's causing this - i'm sure ATI don't.
Incidentally, nVidia stopped the full-screen-mirror facility for some reason years ago, so ATI is hobson's choice if you want to watch this way on a TV. I really don't see why both companies don't make cards that will do the most basic things out of the box without making non-techies jump through hoops. So two stars 'cos it can just about be made to work... and it's not an nVidia.
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