I tried to make a HTPC yesterday using AsRock 4CoreDual-Vsta motherboard and the new Radeon ATI 3450, released only this week. From various discussions on the web, it looks like this old motherboard using VIA 880 Ultra chipset does not fully implement PCI Express specification. It only has 4 lanes where 16 are supported by video cards and its specification is roughly 1.0, that much is obvious from the manual. However, new ATI Radeon 3450 is PCI Express 2.0 and while it displays picture and lets you install Windows, once you attempt to install drivers for it, the PC crashes after reboot and won’t boot again unless booted into safe mode and ATI drivers are removed. Normally, 2 should be backwards compatible with 1 but in this case it doesn’t work and so it really does look like the board’s PCI Express implementation is a hack that has trouble holding up against the tide of 2.0 cards.
The good news is that likely similar problem affecting ATI Radeon 3870 and 3850 was fixed by AsRock just before Christmas, via BIOS update. And before that, there was a BIOS update for ATI 2400 and 2900 series cards. Even though the board is not at all new, it is still being actively supported, kudos to AsRock. I hope they will release BIOS update for my card as well, until then my HTPC is dead.
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Steven Yap // Feb 3, 2008 at 14:51
So, what are you going to do about it then?
2 andrija // Feb 3, 2008 at 16:36
Send an email to AsRock in hope they’ll do something? The card has been for sale only a day or two – Netlink doesn’t even have any so I am guessing the number of people who own one is very low. If I wait, it may take a long time or may even never happen. I’ll have to wait a bit longer to assemble the machine, or use a different motherboard or video card which I loathe because I haven’t yet activated that license of Vista.
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