help, colour problems!

[tommchowat]

hey guys,
just got a new pc as follows:
2.6GHz
512MB RAM
110GB HDD
ATI Radeon 9200 128MB

pretty healthy i'm sure you'll agree. i'm having a huge problem with the colour though, i'm using an old 17 inch CRT monitor for it, and all of the colours are completely messed up. it doesn't recognize red, and the right side of the screen is particularly screwed. i'm pretty sure i've tried everything. i've updated the ATI driver etc and looked at the control panel in the display settings. any ideas??
cheers,
tom

[Bigshot]

Could be related to the 9200 video card. Any 17" monitor should be new enough for the modern video cards. Not a very good video card for gaming, though; and not a card designed for gaming. The rest of your system looks good. You should look for at least a 9600XT or for the best results, a 9700Pro/9800NP/9800Pro or 9800XT card.

[FatTulip]

No offence meant, but what would a 128mb GPU be used for if not games?

DVD playback can be squeezed out of a 2Mb card and image work relies more on RAM and processor. Admittedly, some variants of the 9200 have received bad press, but a 128mb Radeon is better that a 64mb Radeon full-stop.

As far as colours go, try using a different monitor / colour profile under windows.

[Bigshot]

Unfortunately, via marketing hype; folks seem to think that the amount of memory on a card is all important. It doesn't mean squat! Yes, you want to buy a card with at least a 128mb vram. That's pretty much the minimum needed nowadays. A 256mb vram card will be nice for future dx9 games/sims. That's apparent with the new COD game. However; the cards bandwidth and the number of pipelines is all important.

The 9700Pro/9800NP/9800Pro/9800XT cards are 256bit cards with 8 pipelines. The 9600 card is a 128bit card with 4 pipelines. Same with anything that has an "SE" or "TX" in its name. That's what you want to look for!!! Look for bandwidth and number of pipelines and ignore the big bold statement on the cover of the box referring to vram. That's marketing hype intended to deceive you, the consumer. Speed is in the bandwidth and number of pipelines!! How fast can the card process and send video. A 9000/9100/9200 are not much better than a GFMX card. They don't qualify as gaming cards, IMHO. They're not even dx9 cards. DX8 only and they're slower than cold molasses in processing video when compared to the big boys. Buyer beware is still prevalent in the computer market